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The Painted Bird review – gruelling descent into war’s deepest horror | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week


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The story of a young Jewish boy’s odyssey through occupied Poland during the second world war is filled with almost unimaginable horror

Czech film-maker Václav Marhoul has created a monochrome epic of anguish set in wartime Poland: a gruelling odyssey of almost unimaginable horror, featuring – but not limited to – violence, disfigurement, bestiality and rape. This had audiences groping blindly for the exits at last year’s Venice film festival, and there can’t be many movies whose closing credits want to reassure you not only that no animals were harmed, but that adult body doubles were used for sex scenes involving children. It is surely intended to echo Elim Klimov’s harrowing war movie Come and See from 1985, whose star Alexei Kravechenko is given a cameo here as a fiercely partisan Red Army commander.

It is based on the 1965 novel and succès de scandale by the Polish-American author Jerzy Kosiński, whose later political satire Being There was famously filmed by Hal Ashby, with Peter Sellers as the gardener whose bland platitudes are mistaken for visionary insights. The Painted Bird is the story of a young Jewish boy in occupied Poland who becomes a survivor-refugee when his parents are taken away to the concentration camps, but who is to find paranoid resentment and antisemitism wherever he goes and is the intimate witness to violence and the degradation of the nation’s soul.

Continue reading…The story of a young Jewish boy’s odyssey through occupied Poland during the second world war is filled with almost unimaginable horrorCzech film-maker Václav Marhoul has created a monochrome epic of anguish set in wartime Poland: a gruelling odyssey of almost unimaginable horror, featuring – but not limited to – violence, disfigurement, bestiality and rape. This had audiences groping blindly for the exits at last year’s Venice film festival, and there can’t be many movies whose closing credits want to reassure you not only that no animals were harmed, but that adult body doubles were used for sex scenes involving children. It is surely intended to echo Elim Klimov’s harrowing war movie Come and See from 1985, whose star Alexei Kravechenko is given a cameo here as a fiercely partisan Red Army commander.It is based on the 1965 novel and succès de scandale by the Polish-American author Jerzy Kosiński, whose later political satire Being There was famously filmed by Hal Ashby, with Peter Sellers as the gardener whose bland platitudes are mistaken for visionary insights. The Painted Bird is the story of a young Jewish boy in occupied Poland who becomes a survivor-refugee when his parents are taken away to the concentration camps, but who is to find paranoid resentment and antisemitism wherever he goes and is the intimate witness to violence and the degradation of the nation’s soul. Continue reading…