The Peasants
Posted by Robin Menken
Director DK Welchman and producer Hugh Welchman’s follow up to their landmark Painted animation feature "Loving Vincent" is The Peasants (Chłop), Poland’s submission for the 96th Academy Awards.
Based on Władysław Reymont’s 1904-1909 Nobel Prize-winning novel of the same name, It follows a year in the life of a Polish village.
Although set in the 19th century, the book, which is read by all Polish teens in school, focusses on seemingly eternal peasant traditions.
The Welchman’s film adaptation follows Jagna’s story,
a headstrong young woman forced to marry an old farmer.
The town beauty Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is the focus of every male in the village. Unexpectedly, free-spirit Jagna meets their lustful eyes, even exchanges knowing gazes, and, as the censoring women's fury builds, the film continues to witness events through Jagna's eyes, giving this revenge fable a modern feminist approach.
My only criticism- why did the filmmakers indulge in distracting modern makeup for Jagna?
Passionate Jagna cuts exquisite papercuts, tends to wounded animals. and begins an affair with older married man Antek (Robert Gulaczyk) the neighboring son of the village’s most powerful and wealthy landowner, widowed Maciej (Miroslaw Baka).
The Mayor (Andrzej Konopka and his meddling wife (Sonia Bohosiewicz) convince Jagna’s mother Dominikowa (Ewa Kasprzyk) to marry her off to Maciej. setting off a dramatic chain of events, almost Biblical in its fury.
Dorota Stalińska plays the old gossip monger Jagustynka, who eventually becomes Jagna’s biggest ally.
The delirious Wedding scene (reminiscent of
Sergei Parajanov's 1967 Ukrainian masterpiece "Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors" in its feverish exuberance) is set aflame by Radoslaw Ladczuk’s lyrical camerawork.
Live action sequences, which served as the template for the paintings, were shot on steadycams. The busy market scene used a steadycam on a crane. The battle scene used six cameras, over 60 actors and 12 horses.
More elaborate than Loving Vincent, which used twelve frames per second, "The Peasants" modeled its workflow on the classic Disney studio system with key frames every eight frames and "in betweeners" filling in the additional frames.
Filmed during Covid and the Ukraine War, High Waldman assembled his animators from Poland, Serbia, Lithuania and Ukraine. The Ukraine war cut much of the film’s staff in half.
As Waldman explained in the LA Contenders panel-
“We bought tickets for all the women, because the men were all of military age so they couldn’t leave.''
“The women came to the border...with their elderly mothers or their children. We had to find them places to live, places for their kids to go to school.”
The Peasants was ultimately able to open their studio in Kyiv, but did not have consistent electricity. “Our painters would work for an hour and a half and then... read... by candlelight for the next five hours waiting for the electricity to come back on,” he said.
Ultimately, the Welchmans sold some Loving Vincent paintings and launched a Kickstarter to buy a generator.
Sony Classics is releasing The Peasant in the U.S.A MUST SEE.
