Beautiful!!
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...
It Should be Large Enough to Hold Everything
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...
The Middle Ages Brought to Life
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...
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