Opiniões dos críticos

Some viewers, it must be noted, have found The Painted Bird too much, leaving the cinema early in a state of distress. War ought to distress us, but this film is more than just a catalogue of horrors. It has something to say about redemption and how we bring society back from the abyss.

The cinematography in The Painted Bird, a rewarding collaboration between Marhoul and DP Vladimír Smutný, is embedded in the tradition of Eastern European cinema that has crossed borders (eg: the films of Andrzej Wajda, Emir Kusturica, Milos Forman, among others), and if anything, posterity would be the byproduct of its penetrating effect.

[T]he film has been hailed as ‘a masterpiece’ by some and it is beautiful to look at, even if it’s horrifyingly beautiful. Or beautifully horrifying. Take your pick.

The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.

This is Marhoul’s world... But Marhoul frees himself of the pressures of historical and emotional veracity. What he offers is a circus of the grotesque – it is Fellini-esque, without any of the joie de vivre.

The horror of the content aside, this is a stunningly beautiful film. The quality of the (black-and-white) photography and camera movement – by Vladimír Smutny – is remarkable: every shot framed with a perfect sense of composition, and a painterly use of natural and artificial light.

This 168-minute black-and-white epic is just about as astringent as arthouse cinema gets, a brutal monochromatic trudge through the horror of World War II that’s based on Jerzy Kosinski’s much-lauded but controversial 1965 novel (it turned out not to be quite as autobiographical as the writer claimed).

There is little mercy in this unspooling odyssey of debasement and degradation, a beautifully shot nightmare presenting the very worst of mankind.

Heavy as the film may be on the horrors of humankind, there is no “tracking shot in Kapó” in The Painted Bird; on the contrary, by respecting its audience, the film creates space to contemplate aesthetics and representation and indicates that depicting cruelty beautifully need not mean making cruelty beautiful.

This adaptation of the novel, directed by Czech actor/filmmaker Václav Marhoul, is impressive on a number of levels … most of them technical. It’s in trying to locate the—for lack of a better term—heart of the movie where problems emerge.

The film is at its best when it makes good on this sense of utter contingency; it’s powerful, even, when glimmers of the uncanny emerge, as during that swarm. But the misfortunes that befall the child at the center of The Painted Bird are so constant, so unwavering, that the film’s insistence on traveling from horror to horror with little reprieve becomes increasingly questionable.

While Kosinski’s prose renders the grotesque vivid by understatement, this adaptation often seems to have little purpose beyond literal-minded visualization.