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Hugh Welchman and Dorota Kobiela (credited here as DK Welchman), the husband-and-wife filmmakers who directed and co-wrote the 2017 film (with Jacek Dehnel), have now turned their attention, and the same painterly style, to an animated adaptation of “The Peasants,” Polish writer Wladyslaw Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. The look of the new film, though undeniably pretty and suited to the antique flavor of the sometimes soapy story, here seems like more of a gimmick. Shot as live action and then transferred to oil paint, the visuals don’t always feel essential to the narrative, which centers on a free-spirited young woman named Jagna (voice of Kamila Urzedowska) who is forced to enter into a loveless marriage with Maciej, a cruel and much older widower (Miroslav Baka), although she loves his son Antek (Robert Gulaczyk).
Sometimes, in fact, the pictures undermine the plot.
Instead of underscoring some of the tale’s contemporary feminist resonance, this quaintly archaic tableau vivant reminds us of the artifice and artificiality of Reymont’s story, placing it at a remove, rather than within reach.
Copying the structure of the novel, which was published in four parts between 1904 and 1909, the screen version of “The Peasants” introduces each of its parts with lovely images of the seasons changing before our eyes. And yet, as visually stunning as those pictures can be, the film’s focus on melodrama — Antek is also married and, quite frankly, a jerk — feels disconnected from the larger themes of the book, which wrapped the central lovers’ triangle in a grand epic that also incorporated sociopolitical discussion of land ownership, exploitation, and personal and economic autonomy. As Jagna’s mother (Ewa Kasprzyk) puts it, just after bargaining with Maciej, the village’s wealthiest farmer, over her daughter’s dowry, which includes several acres of prime farmland: “Love comes and goes, but land stays.”
The film’s most powerful scene, set during their wedding, features a montage of leering, lamp-lit male faces, swirling drunkenly around Jagna — here shown to be as much of a commodity as the dying cow Maciej puts out of its misery in the film’s bloody opening scene.
Unlike the PG-13 “Vincent,” this is not a family film. There’s nudity and a sexual assault, and at one point a violent mob of peasants attacks a group of workers who have been hired to chop down trees on land owned by the feudal “squire” with whom they are in dispute. (“The Peasants” is set in an area of Poland that was at the time under Russian rule.)
But politics take a back seat to Jagna’s more lurid, even tragic predicament, which isn’t exactly a love story, either, except perhaps an unrequited one. Both Antek and Maciej are indisputably bad choices. And poor, lovesick Mateusz (Mateusz Rusin), who’d be a far better match for Jagna, gets sidelined.
There’s the potential for some real emotion here, as well as a touch of real-world commentary about a woman with 21st-century sensibilities trapped in a 19th-century world that feels, at times, medieval. But we can only catch glimpses of it beneath all the flickering layers of paint.
R. At Cinema Arts Fairfax. Contains sexual situations, full nudity and violence, including rape. In Polish with subtitles. 114 minutes.
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