REVIEW: ‘The Peasants’ Is Beautiful Until It Isn’t

Art is merely an interpretation of real life. Impressionist art in particular is an interpretation that pushes the boundaries of natural color and light to engender darker or lighter feelings about scenery or people. Animating an entire film in the particularly cold style of Polish impressionism is a bold choice. Directors DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, who pioneered an oil painting animation technique with their first film, Loving Vincent, embraced this choice in their next film, The Peasants (Chlopi), based on the book of the same name by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont.

At the turn of the 20th century, Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) owns a lot of her father’s former land and is in love with Antek (Robert Gulaczyk). But for the sake of financial prosperity and long-held tradition, she’s forced to marry his father, the recent widower Boryna (Miroslaw Baka). Over the course of a year, Jagna struggles with being the object of village gossip, an unkind marriage to Maciej, and the constant allure of Antek, despite his being married with several children already.

The plot is fine. Fans of the Squared Love series on Netflix will hardly recognize Baka as the unkind man keeping his own son miserable and forcing Jagna to be in a relationship she so clearly does not want to be in. The ups and downs of the seasons lead to community drama and gossip ad nauseam. At first, everybody is obsessed with Jagna for how beautiful she is, but quickly, everybody hates her for how independent she demands to be. She’s accused of terrible indecencies at every turn.

But through her resilience, we see just how depraved the village is. Other movies depict the village’s behavior as mundane but compulsory period-appropriate sexism. Everyone treats Jagna like property and disregards her humanity. However, this includes Antek. The Peasants is not a romance. It’s a scathing condemnation of the way we dismiss sexism as normative, even now. The final shot is impressively powerful and unexpected, especially after the movie takes a deeply violent turn towards the end.

The story of The Peasants is hardly its calling card, though. It’s the tens of thousands of oil paintings that make up every frame of the movie. On its own, the commitment to this art style is impressive. The Polish impressionistic style means some gorgeous backgrounds and deep observation of how light affects the color of a shot. The red glow of fire bleeds all over a few scenes. Dark blues and greens make most of the night scenes glow. When the movement is its most still and the backgrounds the most prominent is when the art shines the brightest.

Because for the rest of the experience, it can be somewhat questionable. The whole movie was filmed and then essentially painted over with oil paints. This facsimilates the impressionistic paintings The Peasants is inspired by. It also causes natural inconsistency in brushstrokes and detailing, which the movie embraces as part of its visual language, but becomes overstimulating during rapidly edited sequences. It also leaves the characters looking like full-motion video characters in old video games. It’s almost right, but uncanny enough to make you wonder the whole time what the movie would have been like if they kept the paint brushes off of it.

It’s distracting more than it’s adding to the experience. For all the gorgeous landscapes and still frames of stunning costumes, the vast majority of the movement in the movie feels like it’s at the wrong framerate the whole time. Fast-paced dance sequences are hard to fully appreciate and virtually every conversation that takes place indoors is just unpleasant to look at because it lacks the beautiful backgrounds the visual style is reliant upon.

Of course, whenever a stunning little moment does appear you’re reminded that this art style is quite innovative and rather cool. But it wears off as soon as you look at it for too long. One aspect of The Peasants that does show, however, is the music. The movie contains several songs and dances and every one of them is beautiful to listen to. You may just find yourself pretending you’re watching the actual actors perform rather than the animation most of the time.

The Peasants is a run-of-the-mill family drama with a strong conclusion and confusing art style. Sometimes, it looks stunning, especially when depicting nature and playing with light the way impressionistic painting ought to. But the rest of the time, it leaves you wondering whether the style benefits the themes of the movie at all. It’s fine, sometimes even unpleasant to look at while contemplating the cruelty of a village against one woman.

The Peasants (Chlopi) is playing now in select theaters.