Husband-and-wife duo Hugh and DK Welchman have invented “the slowest form of film-making in 120 years of cinema”. Which might not sound like something to be proud of, but it is. The Peasants, their follow-up to 2017’s Oscar-nominated Loving Vincent, involves more than 40,000 oil paintings – each one hand painted in around four hours, by a team of 100 different artists – painstakingly strung together into a wildly ambitious and visually stunning piece of work.
The film brings to life the Nobel prize-winning novel by Wladyslaw Reymont – Poland’s equivalent to Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Originally published in four instalments between 1904 and 1909, it tells the story of a 19th-century Polish village where rural hardship and vicious gossip rule the roost.
Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska) is the local beauty, married off to the stern old wealthy landowner man Maciej (Miroslaw Baka), but in love with his rugged, married son Antek (Robert Gulaczyk, who played Van Gogh in Loving Vincent). As labourers plough and till in an unforgiving landscape, old women plot marriages and incremental gain in a world where religious protocol and patriarchal values dictate all. Jagna’s beauty might lift her up out of poverty but the villagers’ suspicions about it could also tear her right down again.
Jagna is played like Madame Bovary: a victim of her time, sure, (she is an expert at artistic paper cut-outs – pretty, but not much use during a bad harvest) but also a naïve romantic blind to the inevitable consequences of her passions, including the disruption of another woman’s marriage. It makes for an interesting evolution as, like the villagers, there are moments when we feel Jagna’s humiliations are perhaps merited. And then when things spin out of control, we’re involved. Don’t we all just love a witch hunt?
The extraordinary animation is not just beautiful but emotionally resonant, lending itself to writer Reymont’s original thematic tussle between colourful, impressionistic descriptions of nature and the brutal realism of rural life. In an early scene a sick cow is slaughtered, thick red blood flooding the screen. One particularly kaleidoscopic scene involves an impassioned dance between Jagna and Antek at the inn (“Play a volta!”) as villagers look on, sick with excitement, less at the romance than the imminent trouble Jagna will be in when her husband walks in.
Mostly, the oil aesthetic lends itself to the febrile atmosphere. In a society with so little, the stakes are always high. Occasionally I found it distracting; there were moments where Jagna’s humiliation was so extreme that I’d have preferred the ultimate realism of live action. Although perhaps that dissonance is what the directors intend: there’s an extra layer of disbelief when assault is animated.
Overall though, this is a remarkable achievement, a strange and compelling dance between different art forms across countries and centuries.