The Mill and the Cross Review

The Mill and the Cross (2011)

(3.5/5)

Visually lush, 'The Cross' is successful in depicting Brueghel's masterpiece

Since the filmic language involves capturing a 3-dimensional space, I found “The Mill and the Cross,” a 2011 drama film, directed by Lech Majewski, a unique envisioning of Pieter Brueghel’s 1564 painting “The Way to Calvary.” Throughout the film, the theme of Christ’s suffering is set in contradiction of the religious persecution in Flanders.

Pieter Brueghel's "The Way to Calvary," y. 1564

The film magnifies the painting with a different set of lens. In the opening shot, the camera pans from left to right showing the large cast of characters from Brueghel’s painting. Scholars in film often times criticize horizontal panning; particularly when the camera loses a greater sense of depth, however, Brueghel’s painting—being a 2-dimensional piece of art causes us to think otherwise about the film. With the exception of subjects moving within the frame, I believe this opening shot gave us the illusion we were seeing his actual painting.

However, there were also some parts which I was confused, in particular, the transitioning of each scene. While there are some amazing techniques used in the film to mimic the painting, I believe that some of them were not properly used.

This makes the film surprisingly more ambiguous, and therefore offers several interpretations of Brueghel’s painting. One is how Brueghel‘s thought process on the composition and applied brush strokes constructs each scene. When he is sitting alongside his patron, he is the omniscient narrator of the film and he has absolute control over plot development. The other interpretation is that each part of the film either correlates to a religious or political message. Christianity and politics were two major subjects expressed in Brueghel’s painting, but the film had to get extremely close-up on each character’s emotional reactions to the persecution in order to convey a similar meaning to Brueghel’s. Certainly, Majewski’s “The Mill and the Cross” is an unusual reworking of Brueghel’s “The Way to Calvary.”