Tag: Jerzy Kosinski

When hate begets hope

Posted on by Paul Risker

Václav Marhoul’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s controversial novel, shot in black and white 35mm, follows the tragic journey of Jewish boy, Joska (Petr Kotlár). Entrusted to the care of an elderly foster mother to save him from persecution, a tragedy leaves the boy alone and vulnerable. He encounters people whose lives have been altered by the violence of the war, who are intent on revisiting this cruelty on the boy.

Marhoul’s previous films include, Mazaný Filip (Smart Marlowe, 2003), a comedy inspired by American crime writer Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and the World War II drama Tobruk (2008).

In conversation with DMovies, Marhoul discussed the presence of hope in his dark and disturbing story, and his ambition to only ask questions.

Paul Risker – Do you see your three films as being connected, or do you believe they should be seen as independent of one another?

Václav Marhoul – Those three films are connected, even though the first is a comedy and the second is a war time drama. The Painted Bird is not a holocaust movie, it’s not a war time drama for me. It’s a more timeless and universal story about human kind.

The character in the film Smart Marlowe is a private detective in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 30s. He’s a lonely cowboy, a lonely guy who is absolutely lost. He’s only trying to survive in the concrete jungle amongst all the corruption, and he has to save his self-respect. It was the same in Tobruk, where the soldier, the young boy is going to war. He thinks that he’s going to be a hero, that he will come back with a lot of medals, and he is going to be honoured, but then finally he’s doing the same – he’s trying to survive and to save and find his self-respect. The penalty he’s going to pay is his death, and The Painted Bird is the same. It’s about self-respect, survival, and the darkness in all of us. Even though a different genre, those three films are still connected by this feeling.

PR – In spite of the disturbing events of the story, there is a presence of hope. Did you want to confront the idea that light and darkness, good and evil are inseparable?

VM – For so many people, Jerzy Kosinski’s book is only a description of the brutality and the violence that people can do to each other. But from the very beginning I saw the many questions and no answers, and I saw the hope.

The three most important things in our lives are: goodness, hope and love. People were saying, “Václav, you must be crazy because this book is not about goodness, hope and love.” But I said, “Yes, it is”, because it’s based on opposites, and the light is in the dark. The reason I saw there was hope is because it’s more important than either love or goodness, which we will never find without hope. In our lives, we’re missing that moment when we realise how important those things are for all of us.

PR – Was your intention to provoke the audience to ask questions in response to the film’s brutality and violence?

VM – A very complicated question for me is how much do we need to have the bad things in our lives? My film only offers the audience questions, but no answers because I don’t have an answer. The most important question is, if we do not meet the bad people then how will know who is good? And if we never find out about those people that could hate us, how will we realise that they can hurt us?

My biggest ambition in this film was to only ask questions, and it’s not telling you what you must feel, what you must think, and that this is my opinion, and you must respect it. It’s very open and for me, it’s a timeless and universal story. It doesn’t matter that the story is set in the Second World War. It could be a science fiction film because it’s about the principles. It could be a western, it could be anything, it doesn’t matter. It’s the principles that are important.

PR – Was the experience of making this film a transformative experience?

VM – A few months ago someone asked me what The Painted Bird brought to me, and I said, “Well, maybe much more than what it stole from me.”

My DOP [Vladimír Smutný] and I were sitting together, we’ve made all my films together, and we always create a storyboard before we shoot. But The Painted Bird was so complicated that we didn’t have any storyboards. Every morning when we woke up, we knew what we had to do, but we didn’t know how we would do it. We were just going in with open minds, and we opened our hearts to our emotions.

It was also fascinating because I shot this film chronologically, and it was wonderful to go step-by-step because right at the beginning I didn’t know what was waiting for me, or what I should expect. It was exciting and surprising for me how more deeply I felt the story day-to-day, and that’s what happened with Vladimír, and that’s what happened with the main character, the young boy played by Petr Kotlár.

It was fascinating to watch how Petr was changing because he understood much more day-to-day. But I have to say that I was surprised what was going on with me, because let’s say to find out the reason for the violence and everything else, it was in fact what I felt before, only just more deeply.

I could shoot chronologically because I had a wonderful producer – me. Normally the producer will tell you, “No, look, it’s too expensive.” Every moment, every day was so challenging for all of us, and I didn’t know what would happen the next day, but it was great.

The Painted Bird is now in select cinemas (UK & Ireland) and on digital.

The Painted Bird

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

The title of this film – and the novel it’s based on – refers to a moment in which a peasant catches a bird, covers it with paint and releases it to the flock circling above. When the bird rejoins them, its altered appearance causes the group to swipe it to death. Meanwhile, the peasant observes with a gruff chuckle, amused by his casual sadism. This is the grim metaphor of The Painted Bird, a Holocaust film that meditates on prejudice, cruelty and just about every negative human instinct one can think of.

The story, allegedly autobiographical, follows a young boy leading a nomadic existence in a slew of Eastern European backwaters during the Second World War. Separated from his parents, he meanders from village to village, hissed at and beaten by almost everyone he encounters. Whether he’s cursed as a gypsy, a Jew or even a vampire – the boy is always a painted bird.

For Czech filmmaker Vaclav Marhoul, this relentlessly harsh story has been an 11-year passion project, and this shows in the quality of his grueling three-hour adaptation, which he wrote, directed and produced. It is a work of genuine auteurship that brushes shoulders with the likes of Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) and Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985).

What is most impressive about Marhoul’s film is how it captures the novel’s pace and brooding tone. The reticent first-person narrative has been adapted into a film of visuals and diegetic sound rather than dialogue, absorbing you with Vladimir Smutny’s stark, monochromatic camerawork. Indeed, it is quite uncanny how Marhoul presents Kosinski’s imagery just as you imagined it, capturing the sense of wilderness and base instinct that makes the novel so engrossing.

The narrative is chaptered according to whose guardianship the boy falls into: Marta, Olga, Miller, Lekh & Ludmila, et al. He experiences some mercy with these people, but it proves fleeting as wicked ulterior motives emerge. After all, he is traversing a war-ravaged landscape with little centralised authority, where the mob rules and order is maintained with arbitrary beatings.

Naturally, this violence begets violence, and there are shades of Bad Boy Bubby (Rolph de Heer, 1992) in how the young boy vents his anger. He is bottom of the totem pole wherever he goes, but with animals – namely a goat – he can exact savage revenge against his miserable existence. Soon, the boy graduates to humans, following the only moral instruction he is given during this hellish odyssey, “Remember… an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This commentary on the cyclical nature of violence is one of the most interesting features of Marhaul’s film and Kosinski’s book. It is the most twisted coming of age tale imaginable, depicting how abusers have often themselves been abused. After the litany of sadism and death the boy endures, it doesn’t bear thinking about what sort of man he will become.

It’s been 55 years since Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird was published in the United States. Kosinski would go on to befriend Peter Sellers, write the screenplay for Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) and give a memorable supporting turn in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981). But it is only now, thanks to Vaclav Marhaul’s dogged passion, that the late writer’s Goldingesque morality tale has been realised on the big screen.

The Painted Bird is out in cinemas on Friday, September 11th.