The Mill and the Cross (2011)

The Polish film "The Mill and the Cross" was co-written and directed by Lech Majewski It stars Rutger Hauer as Pieter Bruegel, and co-stars Charlotte Rampling and Michael York.

The film consists of an attempt to bring to life Bruegel's 1564 painting, "The Procession to Calvary." I have seen this painting in the Kunsthistoriche Museum in Vienna. Once you've seen it, you don't forget it, because it is filled with people and action. (Although, in the painting, Jesus has just collapsed under the weight of the cross, so, in a sense, action has been frozen for a few seconds.)

The painting is also remarkable for a very strange symbol--a windmill placed high atop a stony crag. In the film, Bruegel explains that the miller looks down from his mill and sees everything that is happening below, just as God looks down from heaven and can see everything. So, the mill and the miller work symbolically. However, in a practical sense, the mill would never be that high on an large, steep, stony crag. If a mill were really in that location, no one could bring the wheat to the mill or take away the flour.

The other dominant vertical structure is a cartwheel, raised high on a long pole. This was the device used by the Spanish rulers of the Netherlands to execute and display prisoners. The prisoner was tied to the wheel, and the wheel was hoisted far up in the air. The device prevented anyone from helping the person--if alive--or removing the body. Only the carrion birds could reach the body, which they did, with predictable results.

Technology in the 21st Century makes everything possible, so it's no surprise that the painting is reproduced in the film in a real landscape. Sometimes all the figures are frozen, but other times you can see a cow moving or some other action taking place. The special effects are routine by now, but the manner in which they are used is not routine.

We really have the sense that we are looking at a landscape, and the artist is putting it down on canvas before our eyes. This is a highly creative way to look at life the way an artist sees it, and then look at the way life is transformed and committed to canvas.

We saw this film on the large screen at the excellent Rochester Polish Film Festival. It really will work better in a theater. However, if that's not an option, it's worth seeing on DVD.

My wife and I visited a fair amount of art museums so you could say we're interested in art, and Pieter Bruegel's work has got our attention more than once, especially mine since I'm a Belgian, but in all fairness The Mill And The Cross is just not my kind of movie. I'm not saying it's not well done, it's definitely special and out of the ordinary, very creative and interesting to see how people lived at that time, but it could have used more dialogues and some kind of a story. Don't watch this movie for the acting as that is just the insignificant part, and to be honest some extras are clearly not used to be in front of a camera. The Mill And The Cross is the story behind Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting "The Way to Calvary". Every scene of the movie looks like it could be a painting of Pieter Bruegel. It's special, I'll give you that, but as a movie it's just not my thing, I'd rather go to a museum again and look at his work there.

Another Febiofest screening, Polish director Lech Majewski gave a brief introduction of the film before the screening and stressed on how strenuously the film had been produced, after a four-year span (mostly for post-production and animation) and ultimately mentioned that the pictorial sky in the film was specifically shot in New Zealand. (Thus we should sense some preciousness or reverence?)

The film reconstructs Flemish maestro Pieter Bruegel's masterpiece "TTHE PROCESSION TO CALVARY" in a fictional plot of the tribulation of Christian religion, maybe I was the wrong audience there, besides an initiative appreciation of all the tableaux's verisimilitude, the film utterly eludes me.

The re-enact of Jesus Christ's affliction is no more dauntless than Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE Christ (2004),utilizing a medium of film technology to reproduce a painting is not an enlightened idea, though film industry welcomes all clutches of experimentation, but does it worth all the investment to produce such a hollow replica apart from an overt religious purpose? Also the taciturn words also scotch the aid from a venerable cast, whose theatrical delivery is being mainly delimited.

From a technical angle, the gauche SFX is a far cry from top notch, some CGI blemishes could be well-conceived by any spectator, one embarrassing moment arrives when all actors are frozen into a stop-motion pause, all the horses could not stay put as their human counterparts, their carefree optimism may betray that great paintings are earnestly not in need of any reinterpretation and an overstatedly pedagogic preaching cannot service the aim of converting a person's religious belief, while the film clearly cannot differ idiosyncrasy from ridicule and its excess of self-esteem only stands for a superfluous waste of energy, time and funds.