‘The Peasants’ Review: The Hand-Painted Polish Oscar Entry Is Pretty as a Picture, but Struggles as a Movie

Jessica Kiang
·4 min read

New-made furniture, scuffed to look vintage, rarely convinces as anything other than pastiche. Portraits painted as closely as possible to resemble the photographs on which they’re based are a similarly strange phenomenon: admiration for the painter’s skill is undercut by the sense of creative constraint. For the same reasons “The Peasants,” on which married directors DK and Hugh Welchman apply the technique — of hand-painting over live-action frames — that brought them breakout success with Van Gogh biopic “Loving Vincent,” is a film that impresses in its painstaking, years-long construction, without ever really supplying a reason (beyond prettiness) for such a laborious aesthetic.

To fully handpaint 40,000 oil paintings (which translates to around six frames out of every second of resulting footage) at a rate of five hours per painting, on top of the standard writing, casting, costuming, shooting, editing etc of live-action, is a mission so impractical that Quixote himself would probably have quailed. But the novelty factor of its creation aside, the problems begin where they would in any more straightforward movie: at script stage.

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The directors — apparently not people to take things easy on themselves — have winnowed down the story from the epic 1000-page sprawl of Literature Nobel-winner Wladyslaw Reymont’s novel, a book so famous in Poland it’s taught in schools. But what remains after the necessary excisions feels both too little and too late: The simplified tale is familiar to the point of old-hat, full of outmoded archetypes and observations of gender roles that are so brocaded into its post-feudal, late-19th-/early-20th-century rural milieu that they have little new to tell us now.

Embodying the perils of female wantonness and the chattel-like position of women in this agragrian community, is Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska) a preternaturally beautiful peasant girl who catches every red-blooded village man’s lustful gaze and, from under long lashes, frequently gazes right back. As the film begins she has already moved on from farmhand Mateusz (Mateusz Rusin), and is now exchanging meaningful glances with Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), unbothered by Antek having a family with his wife Hanka (Sonia Mietielica). Indeed Jagna’s inability to feel any sympathy for the less genetically blessed women of the village is, along with flightiness and an apparent lack of interest in much beyond her own romantic travails, among her less appealing qualities, making dubious the attempt, at the film’s conclusion, to enshrine her as some sort of martyr-like icon of feminist resilience.

Antek’s ornery, new-widower dad, Maciej (Mirosław Baka) is the wealthiest man in the region, but refuses to hand over any part of his substantial landholdings to his children leaving his strapping son brooding and resentful. And this is before Maciej puts his eye on Jagna as wife number two. Jagna’s pragmatic mother (Ewa Kasprzyk), backed by a chorus of meddlesome, gossiping village women, agrees that it’s the due of the most prominent man to marry the prettiest girl, and negotiates a good deal for her daughter’s hand.

Although already getting hot and heavy with Antek (as evidenced by several surprisingly torrid sex scenes that look like romance-novel covers come to life), Jagna acquiesces and marries Maciej. Her new husband settles six of his best acres of land on her, further incensing Antek, who quits his father’s farm with the family he can barely support. Still, while he berates Hanka’s “shameful” behavior in accepting charity to feed their starving kids, Antek is soon sneaking off regularly to hook up with Jagna, so blatantly that it’s only a matter of time before Maciej catches them. He does, and things get gradually worse for Jagna, though by now it’s difficult to care.

Judging the actual performances under the layers of paint is tricky, but it seems the actors were required to ham it up a bit, so their expressions would show through the oils. And so everything is telegraphed and on-the-nose, the occasional lively dance scene or folksy cabbage-harvest ritual aside. And even then, there is a strange visual dissonance between Radoslaw Ladczuk’s often delirious, floating camerawork and the heavy, stolid layers of paint that put the actual emotions or ideas of the film so far away.

Backgrounds are impressionistic impasto, while faces are pin-sharp and almost photo-real, and especially in Jagna’s case, accented with distractingly modern makeup. “Loving Vincent’s” shimmery, wibbly aesthetic was at least partly justified by the recreation of some world-famous paintings, and as an interpretation of the way the artist may have seen the world. “The Peasants,” by contrast, which is made of recognizably live-action frames that have been embalmed in oil prior to being reanimated back into motion, has no such reason for its unavoidably interruptive style. It literalizes to an astoundingly hardworking degree the cliché, often applied to films of overwhelming beauty, that “Every frame could be a painting!” without ever wondering “Yes, but should it?”

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