The Painted Bird’s shocking violence speaks more truth about wartime Europe than other films

Just released, as the cinemas start to open up, is a film that I don’t know whether to recommend or not. It certainly comes as a searing reminder of everything, good and bad, that we have been missing in all the months that the cinemas were closed. It has the simple title, The Painted Bird, and is based on a book by the Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski. It is beautifully, languorously, shot, and there is very little dialogue, so no one needs to worry that this is a “foreign” film, by the Czech director Vaclav Mohoul. 

What you probably do need to know before you take your seat (as I, foolishly, did not) is that it lasts more than three hours. But it is not the length that makes me hesitate with the recommendations. You don’t really notice the time passing by. My main reservation is that it is not for the faint-hearted. Reviews speak of “savagery”, “brutal violence”, a gruesome and unrelenting cinematic experience”, “a three-hour tour of hell”. In the months between its debut at last year’s film festivals and its much-delayed general release (because of the coronavirus restrictions), The Painted Bird gained a certain notoriety.

At the Venice Film Festival a year ago, and then in Toronto and London, some critics (not a huge proportion, but enough to be remarked upon) walked out. Either they could not stomach some of the more horrific scenes, or perhaps they felt that violence and depravity of the order depicted here had no place in a film made for general release, or at all. There was also an ethical dimension, with Mohoul challenged to explain what measures were taken to protect the then nine-year old Petr Kotlar, who plays the central role. The Painted Bird soon became one exhibit in a wider controversy about what some see as a growing trend towards “extreme” cinema, with directors chasing ever more shocking effects.

For myself, I have to say that, while there were times I looked away, I was far more repelled way back in the 1990s by Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. As with the vexed question of nudity, the argument about violence comes down to whether it is strictly necessary for the plot, for art, or whatever. And this is where I diverge from the harsher critics of The Painted Bird in judging that, probably, it was.

The film follows a young Jewish boy, who is sent to be looked after by an aunt in what his parents hope will be the safety of the countryside – safe, although this is never spelled out, from the pogroms and the ghettoes, the forced marches and the camps, and the war that is fast encroaching. At just six years old, he is left to fend for himself when the aunt dies, and he starts on what becomes an odyssey across the bloodlands of war-torn Europe.  

The theme of lone survival amid the horrors of war, of course, is one that has long attracted writers and filmmakers. Even as The Painted Bird was approaching its scheduled release date, UK cinemas were showing Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life about the wanderings and torments of a conscious objector in rural Austria after the Anschluss in 1938. What sets The Painted Bird apart, however, is that Mohoul supplies no moral compass, nor does he sanitise the atrocities his child encounters along the way. On the contrary, he has been accused of sadistic exaggeration.

There is much that is left unsaid. Is the child fleeing or searching for his family or simply trying to survive. Nameless and mute, he is variously helped and abused; exploited and tormented, often by others in circumstances as extreme as his own. Along the way, he learns wariness, ruthlessness, resignation, resourcefulness. Flashes of kindness or cruelty come out of the blue, as individuals turn from seeming saint to depraved sinner in an instant, and back again. Some of the savagery is unwatchable. From eyes gouged out, to vicious gang rape to paedophilia and bestiality, it is a catalogue of what no child should ever see – and most adults in peacetime will never see either.

This is not history as such; everything is more general than specific, from the child with no name and no speech to the locations in what today are Europe’s quintessential borderlands – where Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland all converge. Back then, this was disputed land, with authority shifting from one set of troops to another from week to week, even day to day. Russians, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Cossacks, mercenaries, vigilantes, they are all there at one time or other. And the bad can be good, and vice versa.

This is why, for me, for all its deliberate lack of specificity, The Painted Bird comes across as a truer account of the experience of war, and specifically the experience of war in the heart of continental Europe, than perhaps any I have seen. This is partly because there are no heroes and no morality; no “our” side and “theirs”, just a child and those who cross his path, reduced to their bare essentials, all trying to stay alive. But there is another reason, too.

My late husband’s parents – now long deceased – were among the millions who trekked across those very same central European lands, as the war in Europe intensified to its close. Like so many, they said little about it, only that they had been bombed out of their labour camp; that they walked by night and slept by day; that cigarettes were the currency, to be begged, given or stolen; and that Dresden, which they reached a few days after the British air raids, was a veritable hell on earth, with the slaughter and suffering (as described to my husband when a teenager) as harrowing as anything shown in The Painted Bird.

The family was not Jewish. But if my husband had been just a few years older (he was born in a refugee camp in occupied Germany), he could have been the child in this film. Even in the sanctuary of the United States, my husband’s father – like many refugees from that era – was said to have kept an axe by his bed.  

Over the past many years, my work has taken me time and again to this part of Europe. The changing landscape, allegiances and languages are familiar. So is the pervasive sense of insecurity. These are lands where borders changed many times in the first half of the 20th century, the “new” order sometimes lasted only weeks or days – which is one reason why the borders set in 1945 at Yalta were seen as sacrosanct throughout the Cold War. Nor was it just central Europe. Our near neighbours, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, were invaded and occupied within what is just about still living memory.

These were experiences that the UK was spared, and it is something our own national war story tends not to mention, other than in the light of the glorious liberation. Yes, the British suffered merciless aerial bombardment and the destruction it wrought; there was deprivation and rationing. But our land was not disputed; it was not violated by marauders or occupied by an enemy. Many children were sent to the countryside for their safety; some were abused, but none had a daily fight for survival, as the child in The Painted Bird.

The final scenes of the film show the child miraculously reunited with his father, objecting to how, as he saw it, he was abandoned, and unaware of the meaning of the number tattooed on his father’s arm. The child finally has a name – Joschka. But what stays, long after the film ends, is a question: what less visible scars have their wartime experiences left on their lives to come?

The British experiences of war on the home front, and the folk memories cultivated since, are quite different from those of most continental Europeans, especially – but not only – those in the east. Yet we often don’t seem to understand this – or them. Which is why, though I remain ambivalent about actually recommending The Painted Bird, I tend to think that everyone in the UK should see it, as a graphic and shocking aid to comprehending the insecurities that haunt much of Europe to this day.