It’s not often that a film from Poland gets regular American distribution.
This is, however, the case with the 2023 Polish film “The Peasants”, which is currently being screened in the US.
This by itself could be a reason to watch the film at the MJR Troy Grand Digital Cinema 16 where “The Peasants” is on the schedule through Thursday, March 7, with multiple daily screenings.
In recent years, American audiences were able to view such Polish films as “Ida”, “Cold War”, “Green Border” or “In Darkness” only at art houses (like the Detroit Film Theatre), at film festivals or at other rather limited screenings. It would be fair to conclude that distributors did not put much faith in the potential of these excellent films to be profitable. As we know, rarely does a European film, especially one with subtitles, enjoy the privilege of wide distribution in the US. On occasion, American studios instead remake a successful foreign film to make it more palatable for American audiences, rather than risk distributing the original film.
So what did Sony Pictures Classics, the American distributor of “The Peasants” find appealing in this Polish production?
The answer might be found in a press release published on October 3, 2023, where we read:
“Sony Pictures Classics announced today that they have acquired all rights in North America, Latin America, the Middle East, and Australia/New Zealand to Academy Award® nominee DK Welchman and Academy Award® winner Hugh Welchman’s THE PEASANTS, which Poland has submitted as their official entry for the Best International Feature category for this year’s Academy Awards®. The film will also be submitted in the Best Animation category. This news follows the film’s critically acclaimed world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations section.”
And:
“THE PEASANTS’ animation represents an essence of half a century of European painting from the turn of the XIX and XX centuries, with an emphasis on the Young Poland Movement. The film was first shot as a feature film before a group of over 100 painters began working on the painting animation, which took over two years to complete. This same painting animation technique was implemented in the filmmakers’ Oscar®-nominated LOVING VINCENT.”
(https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2023/1003)
“The Peasants” won’t win an Oscar this year, as regrettably it did not place on the short list of the films that are under consideration by the Motion Picture Academy.
In Poland “The Peasants” drew a lot of attention immediately after its making was announced, mostly due to its very well-known and accomplished creators, and the unique animation technique. Both the creators and the technique obviously also caught the eye of Sony Pictures Classics, as evidenced in the quote above, and that was an important reason to present the film to an American audience.
The Welchmans (DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman) who created “The Peasants” made their mark on the movie world in 2017 with “Loving Vincent” which was a huge artistic success, especially at festivals and with more “refined” moviegoers who appreciated the novelty aspect of the film.
The Welchmans brought the life of Vincent Van Gough to the screen with the help of his paintings. They combined a traditional live-action film technique with animation, and first shot the biopic with real actors, and then photographed thousands of painted canvases representing frames of the film. According to the film site (loving vincent.com) over 65,000 frames were painted on over 1,000 canvases. The result was breathtaking: fluid frames, shimmering and pulsating with colors, shapes and brush strokes, appropriately conveyed the turbulent life of the famous artist.
No wonder that this huge international success encouraged the artists to produce another film using the same novel technique.
For the same treatment – first shooting the film with actors, and then “repainting it” – they chose Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s peasant epic “The Peasants”. The novel, published between 1902 and 1908, was translated over the years into many languages and garnered enough appreciation to fetch the Nobel Prize in Literature for its author in 1924.
Telling a passionate story of lust and love between inhabitants of the village of Lipce, as well as numerous hardships and happy events that its families of rich and dirt-poor peasants go through over a period of four seasons, the book was considered such a realistic depiction of Polish peasant life at the beginning of the twentieth century that, as Robert Kowalski writes in his article “Chłopi”, “(…) during World War I the army general staff ordered members of the command administering Polish territories to read the work as a compendium of knowledge about (the) contemporary Polish countryside.”
(https://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/wladyslaw-reymont-chlopi )
The literary critics, however, never looked at the book as such an accurate anthropological account, but rather defined it as a mixture of realism (or even naturalism) visible in the depiction of the harshness of the peasants’ life, combined with a very poetic style, typical of Polish modernism of the late 19th century.
Due to these attributes, the book belongs in the Polish literary canon, but is rarely read “for pleasure”.
The 2023 film is the third cinematic adaptation of the novel. Earlier adaptations were made in 1922, and in 1972 as a critically acclaimed TV series (also edited into a feature film).
In the new, almost two-hour long film it was impossible to capture all the events depicted in the four volumes of the novel. Without giving much of the plot away, the narrative of the film centers around Jagna, a beautiful woman of marriable age, whose beauty brings her the mostly unwelcome attention of many suitors and turns out to be more of a curse than an advantage. Therefore literary critics often saw in Jagna a village “femme fatal”, a character who brings doom on herself and the men she attracts.
Jagna, with her tenderness toward nature, artistic skills and disregard for land ownership, which in the village community was the sole definer of one’s status, is an outsider, unfit to thrive there, trapped by the ways of the village.
As a literary character in a novel which bridges realism and modernism, Jagna lacks agency: she passively agrees to marry a much older widower (Boryna), accepts the sexual advances of other men, and does not even seem to care what the village thinks about it.
The tightly-knit community, especially the women who feel threatened by Jagna, ultimately decides her fate, which in the film is even more brutal than in the novel.
A scene of Jagna dancing at her wedding is particularly haunting. Man after man grabs her and whirls her around, while she becomes exceedingly exhausted and frightened. But nobody cares; she is just a desirable piece of flesh, a passive participant in an old community-sanctioned ritual.
The poetic side of the book is very well represented by the impressionistic style of painting used in the film, which is very similar to the one used in “Loving Vincent”. As in “Loving Vincent” this treatment is very fitting, even if on occasion it feels somewhat gimmicky. Especially the shots composed “after” the works of Polish impressionists, such as Józef Chełmoński (“Indian Summer”, “Cranes” and others) are extraordinarily beautiful. Not only do they perfectly complement the narrative but make nature one of the main characters in the film and suggest additional interpretations of the film.
(For the list of the paintings used in the film go to: https://niezlasztuka.net/o-sztuce/film-chlopi-i-malarskie-inspiracje/ )
Any time a new adaptation of on old classic is made, the question “does the film provide a new reading of the book?” usually occurs.
Jagna, the main character of the film, is too ambivalent of a figure to be an icon of contemporary (or any) feminism; especially her lack of agency could be problematic for such an interpretation. She is a dreamer and a victim of her circumstances: there is no place in the village for a beautiful and artistic woman who does not confirm to the moral code of the community or fulfills the obligations traditional gender roles impose on her.
The men exhibiting similar “immoral” behavior are not criticized or ostracized by the community, as Jagna is.
But the film could be also interpreted in the context of a renewed interest in the history of the Polish peasantry.
The use of well-known paintings in the film, created by artists from the gentry class, but with peasant or nature themes, also encourages such interpretations, as it makes us think about who was/is in charge of the usual “peasant narrative”.
Until recently a desire to have some “noble ancestry” was overwhelmingly shared by Poles. A “noble heritage” was highly valued and the often exaggerated and idealized “virtues” of the Polish gentry class, especially their eagerness to fight for an independent Poland, were venerated. Having such an ancestor could do a lot for one’s real or imaginary social status, not mentioning the ego.
On the other hand, there was no respect to be gained from having “humble”, peasant origins. Peasants of the past were perceived as largely passive and lacking patriotism, and peasant ancestry regarded as useless in terms of providing a descendant with valuable “cultural capital”.
After 1989, for many years, peasant history was neglected by researchers. The last decade or so, however, witnessed the publishing of many excellent and fascinating books on the topic, and the truth that most Poles indeed have peasants’, not gentry, roots entered the collective Polish consciousness.
Some of these books came up with a very strong criticism of the mores of the celebrated and envied “gentry” class.
This constitutes a very much needed shift in the collective thinking about the Polish identity.
The film “The Peasants” adds to this discourse. Showing on the one hand the harsh realities of our ancestors’ lives, their struggles and successful perseverance in the face of many adversities, and on the other some of their vices such as greed, volatility and lack of tolerance towards “otherness”, the film invites contemporary Poles to exam their own attitudes and beliefs.
Aside from “Polish identity” considerations, the film succeeds in captivating the viewer with its fascinating, novel artistic form. With a compelling story set against a beautiful countryside, and with very evocative contemporary folk music, this film is worth seeing.
“Chłopi”/ “The Peasants”, 2023, running time: 115 minutes.
Directed by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, screenplay by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, based on “The Peasants” by Władysław Reymont, produced by Hugh Welchman and Sean M. Bobbitt, cinematography: Radosław Ładczuk, Kamil Polak and Szymon Kuriata, edited by DK Welchman, Patrycja Piróg and Miki Węcel, music by Łukasz “L.U.C.” Rostkowski, starring: Kamila Urzędowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Mirosław Baka, Sonia Mietielica, Ewa Kasprzyk, Cyprian Grabowski, Cezary Łukaszewicz, Małgorzata Kożuchowska, Sonia Bohosiewicz, Dorota Stalińska, Andrzej Konopka, Marcin Rusin, Maciej Musiał.
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