"The Peasants" - Film Review
The Peasants is a sprawling, historical-fiction, animated film about life in rural Poland in the early 20th century. The story is centered on Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska), a poor woman living in the village of Lipce. She’s an artistic soul who enjoys making cutouts, but she knows that art is not a viable path for her. Jagna is in love with the son, Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), of the richest man in the town, Maciej (Mirosław Baka). Antek is married to Hanka (Sonia Mietielica), but also has feelings for Jagna. The two meet in secrecy, but these rendezvous are threatened by Jagna’s family’s insistence that she marry the recently widowed Maciej. In this small, gossipy town, few secrets can truly stay hidden.
At times, The Peasants feels beyond comprehension. We’re so used to the specific animation style that Disney and Pixar have popularized in recent years. Animation has been synonymous with cartoonish, made to be something that is so clearly not grounded in realism. Every single frame of The Peasants looks like a painting that belongs in a museum. And then the most magical thing happens — the painting comes to life. A blush grows on Jagna’s cheeks, a glint appears in Antek’s eyes, a smile comes across their lips. It’s art in motion, all film is, but The Peasants is perhaps the most literal means of demonstrating that concept. The characters do not feel as though they’ve been imagined simply for the sake of this film. They look, emote, and move the same way you and I do. The process of animating that husband and wife filmmaking duo DK and Hugh Welchman use is rotoscoping. It’s a painstakingly slow process to animate a stick figure this way, let alone fully defined humans, their clothes, surroundings, and motions. Beyond all else, The Peasants is a visual treat that is utterly captivating. For all the debates on AI replacing the work of people, The Peasants is proof that something will be lost if we take the human touch out of the creation of art.
courtesy of sony classics
The beauty of the animation style seems to work against the film in terms of creating a connection between the audience and the characters. The Peasants is based on a four-volume work by Władysław Reymont, who won the Nobel Prize for these novels. It’s an interpersonal story that aims to critique a woman’s freedoms in the early 20th century. The film adaptation seeks to be a sprawling work that covers the events of all four books, which leaves the characters feeling hollow. There’s no beating heart within them, no deep desire that comes across to explain their motivations. Everything feels scripted, as though no character is making a decision on their own. Instead, they are simply playing out the beats of a story. Obviously, no character in any fictional movie is making their choices as the audience is watching, but the magic of movies makes us believe they are. The emotion and desperation of the star-crossed lovers who are separated doesn’t come across because the characters are so underdeveloped. There are far more song and dance scenes than there are introspective moments of character building.
Even with its structural issues, it would be wrong to fully turn on the artistic feat that The Peasants has brought to the silver screen. Over 200,000 hours were spent by artists creating the oil paintings that would make the motion the audience sees on screen. Painters from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Serbia came together to make this vision a reality, and the visual experience of The Peasants is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, & YouTube. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.