The Mill & The Cross

Just saw this film at the Tivoli. Never heard of it and chose it spur-of-the-moment. The best film of its kind I've seen since The Tree of Life.Mill is based on a famous painting by Pieter Bruegel called "Way to Calvary," which depicts the Crucifixion.

The great Rutger Hauer plays Bruegel, Michael York his patron, and York's wife, Charlotte Rampling, Bruegel's reference for Mary, Jesus' mother.

This film seems much longer than its 90 min. running time due to a protracted opening where we are presented with a series of scenes that seem random, mostly scenes of everyday rustic life: a man and his wife eating breakfast in a mill, men chopping down a tree, a man and his wife having a picnic and eating bread, a woman breastfeeding her child, a spider web. This goes on for around 45 mins. and in this time there is almost no dialogue, just lingering images that look like museum paintings. This is the only thing that saves the movie's first hour, it's beauty, because there aren't 2 scenes that fit together logically. Like 2001 or the first Alien feature, this slow pace allows the viewer to appreciate the art of the film. It's truly a wonder.

Finally, the dialogue comes in with a scene showing Bruegel sitting and all of the disparate scenes together on a canvas. He then provides the context in which to see these various scenes and magically all of the previous scenes makes sense.

From this point, the film plays out to its inevitable outcome. A very good film. Not mainstream. Aside from a couple of very brief torture scenes, there's absolutely no action to speak of. This is an art film and the number of heads in the theater attested to this. But if you're looking for a good way to spend 90 mins of your life I can think of no better expenditure of time.

This is the reason that I love film...or at least film as an art form. Words simply cannot do justice to this multi-faceted, thought-provoking, brilliantly colored movie. It belongs to that extremely rare sub-genre of films where the director literally lets us walk inside an oil painting where the figures become "tableaux vivants". Two other such films are "The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting" or "Rembrant's J'Accuse." But of the three, this is the most profound - and undoubtedly the most beautiful. I rank it among the 10 most gorgeous color movies I have ever seen. Should you rent or buy it...definitely select Blu-Ray because "that" will make a difference.

There are no less than four major threads to the movie. First, it is a portrait of a time and place - the Renaissance world of Pieter Bruegel in Flanders during the 16th century...a Europe of oppression, Spanish rule, and Catholic aggression toward heretics. Second, it is a story about the thought processes behind the strokes of paint, as narrated by the artist himself. Third it is a representation of the Passion of the Christ - a brilliant re-interpretation by Pieter Bruegel for his largest oil canvas "The Procession to Calvary". Last but not least, it is an exploration of our interior and exterior lives.

Obviously, in Medieval or Renaissance art, there are many artistic representations of the Passion of the Christ. But what makes this one so unusual is that Jesus is literally at the center of the picture but he is barely noticeable. There he is, collapsing, trying to lift up the cross and get to Golgotha; Christ has stumbled. Jesus is not any larger than most of the other characters in the frame of this giant oil painting. There are hundreds of other figures in the painting - in every walk of life - from love-making to picking pockets.

But why is Jesus so small, so barely noticeable? I believe the artist is telling us that the Christ figure is inside all of us...but that we just don't bother to notice "him". Most of us are too busy with other activities...making a living, trying to impress a pretty girl, taking care of children, and on and on. Every aspect of life is depicted in this film because every aspect of life is depicted in the painting. [Undoubtedly, the artist had to paint such a large canvas to embrace every variation of human activity]

Then again this is a profound narrative of the Passion Experience, as understood by Christians in the 1500's. In the painting, God as flesh has come to earth to live among us; his death and sacrifice should not be mourned but understood as the great redeeming event for mankind. (This is made clear by the ending of the film). And...God the Father - as the engine of the world - is also there. In the film he works on top of a mountain in a giant mill. There GOD grinds our daily bread. Brilliant!

In the earliest biography of Pieter Bruegel, the author [Karel van Mander] suggests that the painter was a profound independent thinker possessing possibly subversive opinions about religion. He states "One sees many unusual inventions of symbolic subjects of his witty work in print, but he had still many more, neatly and carefully drawn with some captions on them, some of which he got his wife to burn when he was on his deathbed because he was sorry or that he was afraid that on their account she would get into trouble or she might have to answer for them." But one thing is certain in this movie...Breugel was appalled at the persecution of heretics.

When the director does let us walk inside the painting, he does not downplay the violence - neither of the callous torture of heretics nor of the agony of Christ himself. True, this is not gratuitous violence but it is nevertheless highly graphic and very disturbing. This is NOT an appropriate film for young children.

Through the use of beautiful photography, gorgeous fabrics, and CGI graphics, the film is absolutely glorious to behold. In every way, Bruegel's painting is recreated in such fantastic detail that indeed I imagine myself living inside of it. Roger Ebert said of the movie - and I agree - "Any description would be an injustice. It is a film before which words fall silent."

There is not much dialogue in the film...it is meant as a contemplative experience. But for those who wish to engage with the religious message or for those who merely treasure eye-dropping cinematography, this work should NEVER be missed.

In The Mill and the Cross Polish director Lech Majeski takes the viewer into Pieter Breughel the Elder's 'The Way to Calvary', a painting which depicts Christ's path to his crucifixion in 15th Century Holland, a country then suffering under the yoke of war with Spain.

In the painting, as Breughel explains to his patron, the city of God and the tree of life appear on the left, the city of death and the tree of death, an execution wheel, on the right. Between the trees of life and death a windmill is perched high upon a mountain from where God gazes down upon his creation. In the centre, beneath his father's gaze, Christ falls on his path while, as ever in Breughel, everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster, the crowd staring, instead, at Simon Peter being collared by soldiers to help the convicted carry his cross.

The film recreates the everyday lives, joys and sufferings of the Middle Ages, the simple commerce of the townspeople, love making in the morning, a soldier horribly executed on the wheel, the aforementioned tree of death, and a woman buried alive for an unspecified offence.

Majeski uses other images from Breughel for his tapestry, a scene recalls 'The Hunters in the Snow' and towards the end, with Christ crucified, the villagers dance, in a scene reminiscent of Breughel's wedding dance paintings.

At the film's close the camera pulls back from the painting into the modern art gallery where it hangs. The viewer sees the distant age he has been privileged to relive recede and emerges, once again, blinking, back into the modern day but with a deeper understanding of Breughel's art and his world.

Original and moving.

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