There are few films released in theaters that defy traditional review. Neatly packaged summations intended to outline plot and satisfy reader expectations ought to be rendered moot. There are some types of films that simply require extensive criticism, not because they contain crushing insight or are so intellectually high-brow so as to be interpreted inscrutable. Rather, these cinematic explorations are devoid of conventional plot, and thus, confound and (when done well) presumably linger. The challenged viewer is compelled into greater excavation from within. His perception shaken, he seeks tangible remedies: historical research, philosophical readings, or, at the very least, impassioned post-screening discussion. The film initiates. And the viewer engages in an age-old dialogue.
Lech Majewski's The Mill And The Cross is one of the movies, or so it purports to be. An art film through and through -- in conception, aesthetic, and content -- it examines Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting, "The Way to Calvary". We follow Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) through his day as he philosophizes, imagines, and, at times, transports himself directly into his depiction of Christ's struggle to carry the burden of the cross on his back. This clearly is not a biopic. There are no scenes of Bruegel in struggle at work or with personal demons. We are working in a world without rules.
Attempting to bring art to filmed life -- which is itself a recreation imprinted on the canvas of film -- The Mill And The Cross foregoes narrative in favor of meandering exploration. Bruegel is depicted as a poetic sage, wandering from his home to his high hillside. This is where he finds the point of view for his painting. Atop, he watches the players that will populate his painting go about their daily lives. Along the way, he encounters a spider in its web and is struck by its natural symmetry. He ponders aloud with pen in hand, "I will work like the spider I saw this morning building its web. First, [the spider] finds an anchoring point -- the heart of my web." In close-up, Bruegel lands on Christ in the center of his rudimentary sketch. That will be his anchoring point.
Coming as no surprise, the film borrows its title from a critically triumphant, academic work, which we may safely assume influenced the director. However, Majewski mostly veers away from "historical authenticity," a term of questionable value since Bruegel's painting was in its time an anachronistic allusion to the barbaric religious repression enforced by Spanish rule. Heretical reformers were slain for questioning the theocracy. Much like "The Way to Calvary", Majewski's film goes to great lengths to illuminate the hypocrisy of man-made institutions (i.e, government) speaking on behalf of Christ the savior. Men are beaten, chained, and hanged. A woman is buried alive. Violence is rampant but never sensational, depicted in real-time and long shot. The result is both distancing and affecting. Meanwhile, The Mill and the Cross refuses to delineate where the "real" world ends and the imagined, painted world begins. Visually spectacular, the cinematography inter-splices Bruegel's painted background as he looks down into or walks amidst his sea of moving characters. It's a magnificent undertaking, head-scratching and absorbing.
Though overly long at ninety-two minutes, this grand enterprise of a film details how a sole artistic vision can reckon and immortalize man's most baffling ventures -- love, theology, political unrest (circa 1564). The Mill And The Cross can't really be called a success or a failure. It just hangs there, dangling on the screen in dialogue with itself (and at times, us). To some, that will provide meaning enough.
