The Peasants: A Painted Polish Period Potboiler
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-
If degree of difficulty mattered in films the way it does in gymnastics and ice-skating, the animated Polish period potboiler The Peasants would win all the bonus points.
Adapted from a four-volume, 1,000-page novel from the early 1900s by Nobel Prize winning author Wladyslaw Reymont, it’s an old-fashioned tale of passion and punishment in a Polish village in the late 19th century. Like a number of celebrated novels of the period, the story focuses on the patriarchy’s constraints on women’s freedom.
In the opening scenes, the widowed mother of 19-year-old village beauty Jagda (Kamila Urzędowska) pushes her daughter into a loveless marriage with Maciej Boryna (Miroslaw Baka), a sour, widowed, middle-aged farmer.
The trouble is Jagda carries on a torrid clandestine affair with Boryna’s brawny married son Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), who is married to Hanka (Sonia Mietielica). Once exposed, their affair leads to a chain of events that changes their lives and rocks the small community.
In adapting the novel, husband and wife filmmakers SK Welchman (née Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman repeat the technique of their 2017 Oscar-nominated feature, Loving Vincent.
After shooting actors in costume against green-screen backgrounds, the filmmakers employed a team of dozens of artists in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, and Ukraine to paint more than 40,000 frames of separate oil paintings, which were used to create the final film. With the added complications of COVID pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the film took five years to finish.
In following life in the village over four seasons, the film’s look embraces Polish realistic painting around 1900, along with other 19th-century European works, such as Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners.
At best, this gives us a series of quasi-anthropological scenes of weddings and harvests celebrations. Actors dance in candlelit rooms shimmering with painterly brush strokes. Conflagrations of yellow-orange flames light up blue nights.
Landscapes change from dappled sandy brown to white granular snowfields as the seasons change. Lovers press pink and beige flesh together and Jagda’s cheeks and forehead frequently glow as if she carried a high-wattage lightbulb inside her head.
These images are intriguing and intermittently beautiful, but the technique gets repetitive, and the gap between the visual lavishness and the so-so script is distracting.
Jagda, while abused, is far from a sympathetic figure. And the men around her are worse — greedy, brutish, and cruel. Then there’s the question of the performances. As if struggling against the painterly surface, the actors play broadly with no room for introspection.
Even when what the characters are doing on-screen is shocking, the effect stays aesthetically detached. In the case of Loving Vincent, the filmmakers evoked Van Gogh’s personality through the urgency of his painting style. Here, the justification is unclear beyond the novelty of matching a literary work to the art of its time.
The Peasants. Written and directed by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, adapted from the novel by Wladyslaw Reymont. Starring Kamila Urzędowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Miroslaw Baka, Andrzej Konopka, Ewa Kasprzyk, and Sonia Mietielica. In theatres February 16 in Toronto (TIFF Bell Lightbox) and Vancouver (International Village), February 23 in Montreal, and throughout the winter/spring in other cities.