There is a curiously irreconcilable contradiction to The Peasants. Here is a movie that is compositionally beautiful -visually and aesthetically enrapturing in every frame on a level few animated movies achieve; and yet the subject of this imagery is so often dour and grim, even horrific in some beats. What you are looking at is depressing, uncompromising, and yet it is rendered with such vividness, with mesmerizing craft. It is a challenging effect, leaving you as impressed as you are disturbed.
I have no idea why directors Dorota “DK” and Hugh Welchman, who brought to life the visionary animation masterpiece Loving Vincent several years back, chose as their follow-up project an adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s turn-of-the-century Nobel Prize-winning epic novel The Peasants -a stark impression of life in a poor Polish farming village. It’s quite a shift in tone granted, for the pair and their legion of artists -hand-painting the film as in Loving Vincent one frame at a time off of bare footage. But it’s not a narrative that immediately lends itself to animation, requiring a lot more effort than a live-action film to bring to life a story and imagery so pessimistic in nature. Perhaps this itself is grounds enough, a way of further breaking barriers with what can be done in animation, what kind of stories can be told. But the reasoning beyond that for this story in this form is mystifying.
Sequestered into seasonal chapters, The Peasants concerns the rural denizens of 1890s Lipce -primarily a spirited girl Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska) who is in love with Antek Boryna (Robert Gulaczyk), though married against her will to his widower father Maciej (Mirosław Baka) -the richest man in the village. As the relationship estranges father and son and as the married Antek continues to pursue the affair, Jagna is caught between multiple men whose entitlements and jealousies turn cruel and violent -all while the peasants' way of life is infringed on by the wealthy landlords.
Where Loving Vincent of course drew on the expressive stylings and distinctive texture of the work of van Gogh as its aesthetic bedrock, The Peasants having no direct artistic figurehead of a source finds its visual language in the modernist work of the Young Poland movement. By comparison the look of this movie then is much more literal, with a depth to the images more suggestive of the rotoscope technique used to capture actors and some objects as references for the oil painted frames. But of course seeing more clearly the filmed images doesn’t make the technique any less impressive. In fact it often makes the movie more visually compelling, as you can identify where the photography blends impeccably with the brushstrokes. As with Loving Vincent, the whole movie is in the most literal sense a work of art, breathtaking to behold. The specific painterly details to the visages of the actors, the visual lucidity and variance informed by mood, the subtle motion of the backgrounds, as fluid as the features of the subjects as they move and talk -it’s all thrilling. The movie’s colour palette, though not as striking as its predecessor, is still rich and mesmerizing in its own completely unique way. The movie is a magnificent treat just to look at -compelling even in its darkest or bleakest moments- and rather than feel like a gimmick recycled, the Welchmans more makes the case for this technique as a valid new format for animation.
And yet the subject matter that it is all in aid of is frequently very dim. The scope of the movie is quite large, despite taking place apparently across just a single seasonal cycle (though this could just be a metaphor for a much longer span of time). Its setting and time period evoke the romance and aesthetics of Doctor Zhivago -especially in its winter period- but it’s so much more cynical in theme. This is a story fundamentally about the impact of patriarchal social structure on the life of a young woman. Jagna has no mobility and no agency throughout the movie -and it can’t even be said she tries to subvert or resist that very much. Though she continues seeing Antek after her marriage to Maciej, it is he who principally initiates the trysts -yet she’s the one who suffers the reputational damage and distrust of the community. Even before all of this we see that she is the subject of rumours abounding of sexual promiscuity from the elder gossips around Lipce, for no other evidential reason than that she is young and beautiful. Antek even uses them himself to viciously insult his father for marrying her -the earliest of several suggestions his love for her is shallower than initially believed.
Jagna is a passive character by design, a prop between two men with greater power than her and the influence to very easily ruin her life. The film retains her perspective though, and doesn’t hold back her emotional hollowness on the wedding night as Maciej prepares to make love to her, or her frustrated anger at Antek’s wife implicating her more than her husband for the dissolution of their relationship. It is a strong, dynamic performance from Urzędowska, formidable through what she ultimately has to endure. The movie spends a lot of time in the mens’ perspectives but its affection and pity is reserved for her. Her experience with systemic misogyny and sexual control is the grim point, one the Welchmans and their artists make vivid not just through the format they chose but for how they approach that matter within the format cinematically. Apart from the style they are a solid pair of filmmakers, and the way they leave space for adjustments in colour, texture, shading based on certain beats is both inspired and evocative. The push into abstract imagery in diminishing pan-outs, the hazy, chaotic movement through the visceral climax. The impact it leaves you with is stark.
The Peasants has some trouble though articulating a point greater than its singular blunt statement. There’s not a lot of nuance to either Maciej or Antek in their motivations or personality -beyond minor suggestions the son is more like his father than he might think. And outside of the general condemnation of patriarchy and observance that it exists in even the least consequential remnants of society, the movie has little insight on these notions it spends a deal of time fixated on. Certainly the broader world has little relevance on Lipce. It’s not shallow though -the ending while difficult is a note of dour resilience. For Jagna it is especially meaningful in spite of the ambiguity. And there is something in a read of the film as society in microcosm -which paints an even bleaker picture if you will of the systems it critiques. Yet there’s still just something a little bit unsatisfying in its lack of catharsis.
Perhaps the book reconciles that, a book that is itself stylistically experimental in a way that even the Welchmans can’t reach. Still, The Peasants is a triumph of artistry! Even as it may lack the novelty of Loving Vincent, it manages its own sense of captivating expression using the same tools. It’s quite a miracle in execution too, taking about a dozen production companies to finance and having to deal with the shutdown of one of its animation hubs in Ukraine when the war started. It’s a much more involved story than expected, underlined by an acute heaviness, but it is meaningful too. And even its most weary moments shine with the magic brilliance of moving oil on canvas.
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