Always Majewski seems to be serving the painting and the man who painted it as a response to the brutal world life as a Flemish Protestant. We're immediately drawn into that world by Majewski's segue from a shot of the painting to a bold real-life tableau of a landscape full of people being fitted for costumes befitting their different ranks, sharing the space with horses and other farm animals, hundreds of figures in all, many still, some being moved into position against a painted backdrop with a huge mill atop a craggy rock in the background. It looks like what it in fact is - a busy, densely populated movie set - and it's soon apparent that although Christ lugging the huge wooden t-shaped crucifix is the visual center of the painting, he is no larger than any among the throng also occupying the space. The soldiers surrounding and scourging Christ are not Roman. They wear the scarlet tunics and silver-colored helmets of the occupying army of Spain's King Philip II, under whose militant Catholic rule any native of Protestant Flanders could be put to death arbitrarily because they were deemed heretics.
Majewski doesn't overdo the irony of Spanish Catholics butchering Flemish Protestants with impunity in the name of Christ. He doesn't have to, even though Michael York, as the wealthy banker form Antwerp who commissions this and other Bruegel paintings (we see Bruegel's The Tower of Babel and The Hunters in the Snow hanging in his house) decries the carnage (although he himself seems immune from it). Rutger Hauer's Bruegel, conversing easily, if gravely, with his patron, keeps his moral indignation unvoiced, concentrating during his brief appearances on the esthetics and design of his vision, which begins with a spider web giving him the concentric circles of meaning that swirl through his painting. All of Bruegel's paintings teem with people, and they are neither passive nor two-dimensional. Everyone is doing something, however mundane. Peasants work the land, musicians pipe away, kids play. Most are robust and earthy. Almost all are in motion. Their actions seem caught in freeze-frames.
Although Christ could get lost in the crowd, Bruegel shows us in one of his preliminary charcoal studies how he uses diagonals to draw the viewer's eye to Christ. Majewski and his film show a lot more than they tell, and the detail is fascinating, from a peasant couple arising in their hut with a calf tethered next to the bed, to the stolid miller and his wife beginning their day dwarfed by the steep stairs and giant gears that loom over their daily routine. The pastoral aspect of the peasant couple is quickly shattered by a troop of Spaniards on horseback, who strike him down on his way to market and kill him, attach his body to a cartwheel, raise it high on a tree the peasant had felled, and leave his elevated corpse for birds to peck as his wife collapses in tears.
Nor are we surprised to learn that the painting's Virgin Mary (Charlotte Rampling) in the film is the mother of another peasant lad cruelly put to death by the Spaniards, insuring that her expressions of grief-stricken stoicism are no mere pose. Seeing names like York, Hauer and Rampling in the cast shouldn't create the usual impression, namely that they are starring in the usual sense. None has much to say. There isn't much dialogue (most of what's there is in English). More vivid are the lives of the anonymous Flemish, and not just the stricken ones. Fitting, since the community as a whole is the analogue to Christ being crucified here. We also get a sense of how immobile the peasant life of the 16th century was. Mostly they just mutely endure the Spanish occupation, hoping to be spared. Because of the pervasiveness of Christianity, the largely illiterate population was well versed in the religious symbolism with which Bruegel's paintings, like most in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were chock full. The steep outcropping, for instance, was recognized as the rock upon which St. Peter built the Church, with the mill and its four huge blades atop it standing for the Church.
Luckily for Bruegel, the occupying army, like so many oppressors, was too dim to realize what the painting was saying, or Bruegel would not have lived to paint another. Majewski, filming on the blood-soaked soil of his native Poland (and centering a more than usually illuminating behind-the-scenes documentary included as a DVD extra ), doesn't need to belabor or even make explicit the theme of lives being snuffed out via religious or ideological rationales. The Mill and the Cross rises above lecture-demonstration to chart the seemingly never-ending war between barbarity and humanity, making a stand through art. As some parts of the filmed painting move, other parts freeze, and the surface undulates with beautifully, lovingly crafted detail, one repeatedly is impressed by Majewski's daring to be so openly heroic in gesture and contemplative in mindset in a world so bent on motion. Appropriately, the film that began with a jump from painting to film, ends with a return trip from the film back to the painting (enshrined in Vienna's Kunsthistorische Museum), now a part of us as we have become a part of it.
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by Jay Carr
