These two are a bit of magicians. Like Mary Poppins jumping with both feet above sketched landscapes on a piece of sidewalk, DK and Hugh Welchman have the gift of making brush strokes waltz and bringing paintings to life in surprising animated productions. We discovered them with La Passion Van Gogh (2017), their first feature film. The most successful Polish film in the world, nominated for an Oscar against Disney in 2018, this investigation into the last months of the painter of Sunflowers was astonishing in its magic and beauty. It revealed true technical prowess in the form of painted animation, while offering an immersive dive into the heart of his work. It was not a film, but not quite a cartoon in the common sense.
The British-Polish director couple returns with the same process: shoot a live-action scenario with actors then paint each image in post-production, drawing inspiration from the paintings of great masters. The impression of seeing paintings in motion is still as striking. But by adapting The Girl and the Peasants, a little-known novel in France by Wladyslaw Reymont, this time he takes us to a hamlet at the end of the 19th century.
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924, this thousand-page book divided into four volumes is a classic in Poland, in the high school curriculum. It tells of the harshness of peasant life throughout the seasons, with its local customs and superstitions, the communion with nature, the violence of patriarchy and the elements. “It’s a masterpiece, in the tradition of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Émile Zola,” says Hugh Welchman. Peasants were the pillars of European society for over a thousand years, until the Industrial Revolution and beyond. I really wanted to introduce this magnificent book to the non-Polish public.”
The story centers around Jagna. This dreamy country belle, with big blue eyes and long blond hair, is considered the prettiest girl in the village. The men look at her a little too intently and the gossips whisper among themselves behind her back. She would not be shy, they say. In exchange for six acres of land, she is forced to marry Boryna, a widower much older than her.
The affair concludes according to tradition with a glass of vodka that the future bride must drink. But she only has eyes for Antek, her husband’s dark son, with a sharp face and massive body who lives on the family property with his wife and children. A subject of jealousy since her marriage raised her to the rank of richest farmer in the village, an object of desire disputed between father and son, the young girl stigmatizes the resentment and frustrations of the inhabitants.
Two magnificent, stunning dance scenes illustrate this violence of feelings and men. In one, Jagna, on her wedding day, passes from her husband’s arms to those of the guests like a whirling, intoxicated doll, surrounded by the guests who form a rampart around her. In the second, she bursts into sensuality and freedom in a red dress, supported by her lover in a wild dance with the air of a love parade.
Also read: The Irish, new kings of the seventh art
Carried by music and captivating traditional songs, this story is universal. It is that of a peasant world soon to be over, stuck between medieval traditions and the first signs of a new century heralding labor rights and female emancipation embodied by Jagna’s refusal to comply with the rules. Despite the slowness of the story and its demanding austerity, we allow ourselves to be carried away, even hypnotized, by this naturalistic fresco to the rhythm of the seasons, from an autumn in golden colors with its promises carried by birds in full migration, to a summer at the end more brutal under the harsh light of a zenithal sun, overcome by the heat and the labor of the harvests.
For the visual creation, the directors were inspired by around thirty paintings by Polish painters from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, including Jozef Chelmonski. But the images also remind us of other paintings, those of Vermeer, Millet, Monet or Van Gogh. Immersive art is developing in museums. This experience finds an echo in this film where the animated canvases escape from their frame to show and feel a storm in pouring rain with a cart stuck in the mud, the breath of the breeze which sows the pistils to the four winds, the features of a face, in chiaroscuro, lit by candlelight. DK and Hugh Welchman have more than one trick up their sleeves.
The Note of Figaro: 2/4
