The Mill and the Cross

I guess Polish artist Lech Majewski stared at Pieter Bruegel's 1564 painting The Way to Cavalry long enough that the inhabitants began to move. And then he made a movie about them. Far beyond the boundaries of a mere story-behind-the-painting approach, something that was done relatively recently and very well in The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Majewski's The Mill and the Cross is essentially a motion painting. It smoothly, sumptuously blurs the lines between the mediums until we're left with something oddly, fascinatingly unique, a hybrid that is both movie as painting and painting as movie. You can practically see the brush strokes on the celluloid.

For the duration of this free-flowing peek at history through a lens, we watch as the camera vacillates between lingering on the birth of the painting and invading the canvas, where reality takes over. We often see Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) looking down on the valley depicted in The Way to Cavalry and it is during these scenes that Majewski unveils the movie's most creative imagery. When Bruegel is sketching or observing, he occupies the foreground, while the background is actually a living, breathing painting, brought to life through the inspired use of exquisite special effects.

It's actually Hauer standing in front of a blue screen, the lush background the result of a digitally composited piece of animation. The style of the matted imagery references Bruegel's painting, so it is as though we are watching this still capture come to life at the edge of the artist's reach. And yet we can see the figures (kids playing, adults conversing) moving around back there, so it's not still, it's not a painting, but the mixture of the mediums coming to vibrant life. And the deeper our eyes travel into the background, the more stylized the imagery becomes, as though the real world that Bruegel inhabits is bleeding into the painted world, the two combining halfway from each other.

Majewski is mixing realities, as well as mediums. And he does so with confidence and genuine outspoken vision. It's a rather astonishing approach because it returns everything (the imagery, the characters, our attention) to the painting, while supporting the exploration of the people and objects behind Breugel's art. We see various immortalized individuals at ground level, in person, and we also see them from Bruegel's artistically ambitious and wonderfully warped vantage point. The Mill and the Cross is first and foremost a visual experience, so the melding of worlds allows the movie to engage and enchant our eyes in thematically resonant ways.

When we're not watching Bruegel sketch and prepare for his painting, the movie settles in with the village folk and boldly immerses us in their everyday lives and routines. There's the couple with the cow and the mother with the many rambunctious children and the family who live deep within the bowels of a spindly mountain, upon which sits the windmill that the family works hard to control. We meet all of these people and witness their existence so casually that we practically join them and become honorary villagers for the duration of the movie.

All of these encounters are sweet and interesting and very unique. In particular, the windmill sequences are stunning due to the setting and the incredible experience of spotting the painted windmill far off in the distance and then suddenly feeling its power blow past us in a startling and glorious close-up. The interior of the almost impossibly narrow chunk of rock that provides a home for the windmill is another visual delight. The family has fashioned makeshift lodgings around the windmill machinery deep inside the rock, far below the light-emitting hole near the peak. A seemingly endless series of wooden stairs snakes its way up the wall of the mountain's belly, offering escape from the carved cave at the price of an arduous climb.

These poignantly paced, determinedly detailed sequences unfold almost in silence. The sounds of footsteps (especially wooden shoes on hard surfaces) ring out, but for the most part, the characters co-exist without the necessity of dialogue to communicate. Only a few monologues, delivered by Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling, provide an aural voice for the movie. They fill in blanks and provide important information. They are welcome accompaniments, but beyond that, The Mill and the Cross speaks in images. And what a gorgeous voice it has.

Majewski, who co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Francis Gibson, served as co-cinematographer with Adam Sikora, and also holds the movie's sole directing credit, has crafted one of the most brilliantly beautiful cinematic experiences I've had the pleasure to enjoy in quite some time. The Mill and the Cross is a visual tour de force, a cinematic marvel so breathtaking that I question how much breath I have left. The imagination with which this medium meld is achieved is astonishing. So the painting becomes the movie and then the movie becomes the painting. What a magnificent Möbius strip, so carefully conceived and effectively executed. The Way to Cavalry awakes and The Mill and the Cross comes to life. They meet. Paintbrush and camera, together entwined on the canvas.