The film is composed of nine relatively independent chapters under the guidance of the boy, recording the fall of belief, the demise of conscience, and the emptiness of life in the war years. In the frenzied events that followed, the Jewish teenager was ostracized and infested as a "smeared" outlier, leading to a huge variation in the role he played in the events before and after, from bystander to victim, then to to Predators and Avengers. Behind this kind of mutation, the high-pressure social atmosphere in the filthy era of the rape of individual destiny and the reshaping of individual souls is also another reference to "smearing".
The director's talent is difficult to support such an ambitious script. The clumsy transition of chapters makes the sense of powerlessness and struggle to survive are not strongly reflected, and there is also a lack of organic connection between paragraphs. The main body has no soundtrack, the black and white images are dirty and elegant, these are in the right direction, and the attitude of the narrative is therefore quite calm. However, apart from the forest chase at the beginning, the calm shots are lackluster, and the rare scenes of fierce cavalry looting the village are really suspicious. The bland and mediocre language of the shots did not fill the emotional gap left by the zero score, and the audience could not find a release channel for the complex emotions accumulated in the early stage, and I was not even willing to use the word "restraint" to justify it.
What saved the film was the performance with a sense of conviction, and the unified cast made me believe that they were a community living in the same era and the same land. These piecemeal performances save the film from being reduced to a motion illustration of a novel, truly a group portrait of salvation level.
View more about The Painted Bird reviews
