La jeune fille et les paysans

Let me start of with the fact that the visuals are absolutely stunning. Im still shoked that a movie was made with oil paintings and to know its a polish movie fills my heart with pride. The breathteaking views of polish conutryside really filled my heart with joy and nostalgia. The lighting, colors, and placement of everything in each scene was extremely nicely done and helped deliver the movie through visuals. Accompanied by dynamic, imaginative music it was quite the pleasure to watch.

It was such a raw movie, showing off so much polish culture unfiltered. The beautiful and the ugly. Dancing, music, ordinary life with lingering judgment, envy and hate. I have not personally read the original book so i cannot judge this movie in regards to it but im sure its a really good adaptration and ill definitely give the book a read.

Watching the movie you wonder whose in the right and eventually realize that its no one. All characters are flawed in different ways, and thats whats so beautiful and real about this.

Why didnt i give it 10/10? Well as much as i loved it i dont think i fully connected with its story on a personal level, and at moments i couldn't really wrap my head around the plot.

I'm however really confident about this movie going to the Oscars.

Wow... I did not expect this movie to be as incredible as it was!

As a Pole raised in England, I haven't touched bases with a lot of Polish literature. But this movie (based off of the Nobel Prize nominated book) was a great experience.

Not only is it beautifully made and animated, the story was extremely tragic and real.

All of the characters are greatly developed, the plot is enticing, and the music is just perfect.

I would recommend this movie to everyone, Polish or not. Not only is it insight and commentary on past Poland, but also on masculinity, femininity, class, and community.

10/10.

Definitely the best Polish film I've watched this year. I left the cinema in love and i did think about this movie quite a lot. The music rang in my headphones non stop and I replayed the dance scenes in my head probably a thousand times. The costumes, the image of the Polish countryside, references to the Chelmonski's paintings, everything, it just created the most beautiful image that stays with you for a long time. Maybe just i did imagine Jagna to be strong woman, not as tragic, but i like her character as well as the rest. I think the cating was infallible. I highly recommend visiting the cinema for that one! :)

An adaptation of a Nobel prize-winning novel from the makers of Loving Vincent using the same rotoscoped oil painting animation style, that's enough to be interested in this. But with the experience from Loving Vincent, they set out to make it even better. With dynamic camera movements that are meant to give an experience rooted in Polish culture and village life, this movie does an incredible job of immersing the viewers in this world. Kamila Urzedowska is incredible as Jagna, the village beauty, whose life is decided by others at every step yet can't take away her free-spiritedness, even with all the shackles. Even though, the story is a classic European village tragedy, the music and animation take it to another level. That ending sequence is just so incredibly shot and animated that it's impossible to not be moved after watching this. Much of the film would've been a lot harder to watch if it was live-action, even though it is quite hard even in this rotoscoped animated style.

Sometimes you can appreciate the artistry involved in process of filmmaking, but not fully enjoy the experience of watching the actual movie.

This is precisely how I feel after watching the official submission of Poland for the 'Best International Feature Film' category of the 96th Academy Awards in 2024 titled: 'THE PEASANTS' ('Chlopi').

Synopsis: "Jagna is a young woman determined to forge her own path in a late 19th century Polish village - a hotbed of gossip and on-going feuds, held together, rich and poor, by adherence to colorful traditions and deep-rooted patriarchy."

Back in 2017 another Dutch -Polish production 'Loving Vincent' (story of Vincent Van Gogh) was made, with similar painting technique, roughly by the same Polish team. Which encouraged them to create Polish based story. 'Loving Vincent' received a huge amount of good critiques and was admired for its artistry. With this type of technique comes tremendous amount of paint work as each film frame (in PAL system 24 frames per second) needed to be painted over film footage. The reason why this technique worked in this Dutch production is that the subject of the film was about famous, tragic painter, so stylistically and subject wise there was a artistic coherence.

After watching'THE PEASANTS' I was wondering if this painting technique was not too much of a distraction and couldn't help to wonder if without it this film wasn't better off just having a standard color correction.

To be fully immersed in the story and appreciate the actual acting performances, we watch micro body expressions of the actors, judging quality of their characterization by how well the non verbal cues mix with what they say, so that every micro expression specially on their face and eyes, tells us subconsciously what actor in character things.

In 'THE PEASANTS' as camera moves around the whole picture constantly vibrates, just as it happens during psychedelic trip the colors morph and vibrate. The beauty of psychedelic trip is that they are relatively short and intense. 'THE PEASANTS' feels like a almost 2 hour psychedelic trip, which might leave the audience little nauseated. Constant movement in the frame, can potentially create an uneasy feeling in the viewer.

As much as I wanted to love this film, by the end I was happy I lasted till the end, having moments where I felt disconnected from the experience.

To be fair, It must be said all the performances are very solid and again this film is full of masterful work and yet the technique used feels little gimmicky and to be honest in the day and age of phone apps, which add cartoon or painting correction to the video footage, it isn't anymore that unique

To conclude 'THE PEASANTS' is a truly potentially tragic and emotional story, which in my opinion, due to painting technique looses what makes this story interesting. The emotionality is getting lost, which is such a pity.

I do however salute all the filmmakers for the amount of ground breaking work they have done, it's just for my taste, as well as the Academy (sadly 'THE PEASANTS' wasn't chosen to be nominated) seems to agree with my assessment.

I still do highly recommend it due to its artistic value.