The Peasants [Review]
The new film from the team behind Finding Vincent is beautiful to behold, but how does it fare beyond that?
Photo credit: Malgorzata Kuznik. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
The Peasants was directed and adapted for the screen by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman from Władysław Reymont’s novel, published in four parts from 1904 to 1909. After their previous film, the gorgeously animated Loving Vincent, directors Welchman and Welchman are trying to make lightning strike twice with their latest.
The novel, relatively unknown outside of Poland, is considered a masterpiece of Polish literature and is taught in schools there to teenagers. As adapted in the film, the story centers on a small village community in 19th century Poland. Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska) is a young woman, the prettiest in the village and the subject of gossip. She’s uninterested in marriage, but people keep saying that any day a man will “bring her vodka,” a marriage proposal tradition. The richest farmer in town, Maciej (Mirosław Baka), is in a land dispute with his adult children, who want ownership of the land ahead of his death. Maciej decides to remarry as a way to avoid any legal action his children can take and settles on Jagna. The problem is that Jagna has been having a not so secret affair with Maciej’s eldest son Antek (Robert Gulaczyk). Jagna is caught between men’s desires, her village’s deeply held patriarchal traditions, and her desire to control her own agency.
A hand painted frame from THE PEASANTS. Image credit: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The Peasants, like Finding Vincent, is animated with hand painted oil paintings rotoscoped from live action performances, this time in a style inspired by the masters of the Young Poland art movement. The animation is on twos, meaning it runs at 12 frames a second. Every keyframe is an oil painting; according to the production notes, every shot has between a painting for every frame to one every 4 frames, with digitally assisted in-betweens. The look of this onscreen is mesmerizing.
The film’s story, while tragic, is just an average drama. The movie is well performed and does a good job helping us understand the historical setting and culture, but ultimately I didn’t find the story itself memorable. My understanding is that the 1000+ page novel delves deeply into details of Polish peasant life and my favorite part of the movie is how those details and traditions are depicted on screen. One of the most memorable bits is the very musical, energetic wedding sequence, with traditional music, dancing, and costumes. The film is most remarkable for painting a picture of that life and women’s struggles in it rather than the specific story it tells.
Image credit: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
I’m not sure that the animation or its style was really necessary in telling this story, considering that it was all rotoscoped and there weren’t many instances of the qualities of the animation itself having an impact in the storytelling. At times the animation, while beautiful to behold, distracts from everything else. I do think the animation and the film directors’ profiles coming out of Loving Vincent will have an impact on the film being seen outside Poland, and that’s a powerful thing; if we consider it that way, the animation is certainly justified. After all, The Peasants was Poland’s submission for the Best International Feature category at this year’s Oscars.
Sony Pictures Classics’ The Peasants is in theaters now, in an expanding limited release that began on January 26.
