The Paint­ed Bird

This pun­ish­ing but undoubt­ed­ly bril­liant mono­chrome epic opens on a trav­el­ling shot of a small boy, run­ning as fast as his legs will car­ry him while clutch­ing his fluffy, white pet fer­ret. He is barged from his flanks by anoth­er kid and the fer­ret is snatched off of him. While pinned to the floor, he wit­ness­es his fur­ry friend being cov­ered in some kind of flam­ma­ble liq­uid and then burned alive. It squeals in agony before flop­ping over to accept its fate.

For the unnamed boy, played with a bat­tle-hard­ened pok­er face by Petr Kotlár, this is only the open­ing act of a world of intense, diverse and occa­sion­al­ly sur­re­al suf­fer­ing. But for him, the release of death is nev­er an option.

The Paint­ed Bird is a mes­meris­ing, episod­ic trav­el­ogue film by Czech direc­tor Václav Marhoul, based on the 1965 nov­el by Jerzy Kosiński. It is a por­trait of a bro­ken con­ti­nent, hous­ing a pop­u­lous unteth­ered from basic moral­i­ty. The notion of extend­ing empa­thy towards a pure, vir­tu­ous child is lost on these peo­ple, who com­prise a rogues gallery of depres­sives and eccentrics, pae­dophiles and nympho­ma­ni­acs, all of whom choose to direct the sum total of their world­ly tor­ments on this doe-eyed visitor.

Marhoul paints a grotesque fres­co which bare­ly hints at a wider con­text. He refus­es to chan­nel his anger towards sys­tems, gov­ern­ments or the tides of his­to­ry and remains ful­ly detached from the boy’s cru­el des­tiny, just fol­low­ing the trail and watch­ing on with a cold­ly objec­tive gaze.

Here, evil is always a per­son­al choice – a sim­ple human deci­sion dic­tat­ed by cir­cum­stance, but also by the dou­ble-edged sword of iso­la­tion. Many of these mon­sters are sim­ply stir crazy, trapped in their tum­ble­down huts and wait­ing for some kind of sweet release. Their seething malev­o­lence is nev­er dri­ven by some high­er edict, but can some­times be under­stood as the result of geopo­lit­i­cal chaos and a world too busy with the mat­ter of tear­ing itself apart.