Husband-and-wife film-makers DK Welchman (née Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman made a real impression five years ago with their animation Loving Vincent, made in a pastiche style of Van Gogh’s own paintings using digital techniques to enhance hand-painted original work – a bit like the rotoscope approach of computer animation pioneer Bob Sabiston. A single-joke or single-idea movie, perhaps, but certainly interesting. Now, to some acclaim, they have done the same thing to the 1904-09 novel The Peasants by Nobel prizewinner Władysław Reymont (first adapted for Polish TV in the early 70s).
There’s the same digi-painted world derived from live action, the same visual effect of the forms and details on screen seeming always imperceptibly to throb or rustle, like a field of corn. A reference to Millet’s painting The Gleaners is arguably intended, but fine art isn’t the point. In a remote village, Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is a beautiful young woman in love with glowering farmhand Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), who is married to Hanka (Sonia Mietielica) – a painful situation made even worse when Jagna is impelled by her family to marry Antek’s wealthy and cantankerous widowed father, Maciej (Miroslaw Baka), on whose farm Antek resentfully works. The resulting domestic menage leads to calamity.
It’s a strange piece of work in many ways. Despite the animation, the film is entirely realist and literal in its approach, and you can’t help imagining the “real world” original footage. Without this animated veneer, the performances are a bit hammy and TV soap-operatic, and it is strident where it could have been mythic and tragic. Everything culminates in a misogynistic festival of hate for its female lead, which is a little like Lars von Trier’s Dogville or Cersei’s walk of shame from Game of Thrones. There is visual interest here, but for me the drama isn’t sustained.
• The Peasants is released on 8 December in UK cinemas.
