Final Rating: 4/5
Something that seems to be a universal experience is having to read some well renowned piece literature in high school. At my high school, I distinctly remember my classmate and I latching onto the line from China Achebe’s Things Fall Apart about how Yams are the King of Crops. Other novels I know that are popular here in America include The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and Catcher in the Rye. In particular, these herald back to the idea of the “Great American Novel,” a piece of literature that captures the essence and character of the nation.
Other countries have similar such novels – in the Philippines, national hero Jose Rizal is famous in part for writing the novels Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) and El Filibusterismo (The Subversive) that critiqued Spanish rule at the time. It has actually been law since 1956 that both novels are studied by all students in the country. Having recently started a job at a company with a fairly sizable office in Poland, I learned that the original source material for this film I’m about to review is that kind of novel that everyone is familiar with.
Based on the Nobel Prize for Literature winning 1904 novel The Peasants by Władysław Reymont, the 2023 adaptation by duo DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman is in short, a masterpiece of a film. The duo is perhaps best known for their work on the Oscar nominated Loving Vincent, which had all of its 65,000 frames hand painted in the style of Van Gogh’s Post Impressionist Style to tell a sometimes fictionalized story of the painter’s life.
Here they replicate much of the same process, though this time of course they follow the story laid out in Reymont’s novel to stunning effect as opposed to creating something from scratch. Rather than Van Gogh’s style, instead the filmmakers turn to the more modernist Young Poland art movement that would have been en vogue at the time the novel was written.
While not as well known globally as say Starry Night or Sunflowers, the art referenced throughout the film certainly fits the accomplishment of the novel of being a vibrant depiction of rural peasant life in Poland at the time. It goes without saying that even as a pure visual spectacle, this film is a treat for the eyes. That said, the other senses, particular hearing, don’t go unserved either. Polish hip-hop producer L.U.C. provides the score with an energetic yet haunting soundtrack that mixes modern sounds with traditional instruments and melodies.
Talking to my coworker, I also learned that this adaptation of The Peasants does change some things, in her opinion for the better. Whereas in the original the main character of Jagna (here played by Kamila Urzędowska) was a bit of a side character and more focus was on the day to day peasant life from the male perspective.
Here the filmmakers chose to center her plight with a more sympathetic view – yes she still makes some unforced errors over the course of the film but ultimately is depicted as a victim of her circumstances, and particularly the misogyny present in the village that sees her as little more than a trophy to be traded and won. In the end when her presence disrupts community harmony she is outcast and exiled; on a side note, this actually reminded me a lot of the village in the documentary To Kill a Tiger, where a 13 year old girl’s family faces discrimination from their village when they pursue legal action as opposed to marrying her off to one of her rapists for the sake of of the community.
At the end, Jagna, brings herself to her feet and begins to look for a way forward in life despite the hardships, it reminds me that perhaps the most amazing thing about this film is how it got made at all. In addition to the sheer volume of work necessary to have a film that looks and feels the way it does, the animation team also had to deal not only with COVID, but also with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not only did they pause production to move artists out of Ukraine into Poland, for those who could not emigrate, they continued to work through rolling power outages and amidst bombing of Kyiv. In a sense the fact this movie exists is emblematic of the themes of this film of perseverance through negative external factors and rising above adversity.
