Review: 'Painted Bird' brings a disputed novel to grim life
Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird” begins with utter bleakness but over the course of its 169-minute running time, keeps finding lower depths of misery. When it premiered last fall at the Venice Film Festival, a scene in which a jealous husband (Udo Kier) gouges the eyes out of a man ogling his wife and then leaves the eyeballs for cats to lick reportedly prompted a stream of walkouts. That, frankly, does a disservice to an earlier scene in which a young boy, after being buried up to his neck, has his bare head pecked bloody by ravens.
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