“The Peasants” is a film based on a village life melodrama of the same title written by the Pole Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont in four massive volumes in the 1920s.

Even the fact that Reymont won the Nobel Prize for literature for it isn’t much of a justification for giving it a second thought, as in those early years, the Nobel literary prizes were doled out to a string of forgotten figures, while giants such as Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, Edith Wharton, Conrad and Ibsen went to their graves without such honors. Maxim Gorky, Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy were Reymont’s esteemed competition in 1924.

But this potboiler of a book has been filmed and then those film frames painted to life in the same rotoscoping animating style deployed by the filmmakers who made the gorgeous Van Gogh biography “Loving Vincent” a few years back. After casting, rehearsing, acting and shooting the film, another five years were needed for 100 painters to get Poland’s official entry as Best International Feature for this year’s Oscars painted and ready for the public.

And even though it didn’t make that Oscar cut, this detailed look at the life in Lipce, the struggles, ambitions, greed, jealousies and transgressions of its often venaly inhabitants, is too beautiful to pass over.

Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is the most beautiful teen in the village, 19 and blonde and pony-tailed, she is indulged by her widowed mother (Ewa Kasprzyk), who spares her heavy labor so that she has time to be pretty, make artful cutouts and necklaces and such. All the men and boys notice her, and when she’s quizzed about her prospects, this or that “wealthy widower,” she lets one and all know that she won’t be “rocking someone else’s cradle.”

When the richest farmer in town, Maciej Boryna (Miroslav Baka of the “Squared Love” movies) is talked into taking this prize and clumsily flirts, she lets him know just how much trouble she’d be.

“I wouldn’t work in the fields,” she tells him (in Polish with English subtitles). She might not do much around the house, either. I mean, just look at her.

Unknown to the miserly patriarch, his resentful oldest son Antek ( Robert Gulaczyk of “Loving Vincent”) has noticed Jagna, too. Handsome and rugged and headstrong, his attentions are reciprocated.

The fact that he has a wife (Sonia Mietielica) and child doesn’t deter Jagna. When you’re that pretty, you get used to getting what you want.

But their trysts can’t stop the wheels of tradition, as matchmaking is underway. One courtship ritual in this place at this time (late 19th century) holds that when a man sends vodka over, things are about to turn serious and legally so. Boryna sends the vodka through a proxie.

A bit of haggling over acreage between Jagna’s mother and Boryna sets Jagna on the path to matrimony, and multiple families on the road to collision. Jagna practically weeps through her seranaded, danced-to-death wedding. This is destined to end badly.

Animated gimmick or no gimmick,”The Peasants” is gorgeous to look at, with almost every frame its own work of art.

This technique is put to great use on scenes of festive dancing and lurid moments of passion, with our trysting couple caught in a haystack and almost burned to death over their transgressions.

One doesn’t have to know the recent history of Polish art to appreciate the images even if we can’t place the direct influences on this scene or sequence, or that one. We see peasants harvesting cabbages, herding sheep, slaughtering a cow and at every turn, we hear them gossiping about the girl, the old husband, the lover, money and the land.

The melodramatic story touches on familiar themes, situations, conflicts and resolutions of conflict as we follow the rivals for old Boryna’s fortune and land.

But there’s no escaping the realization that melodrama is a perjorative description of any narrative, that many situations seem contrived, that characters act unnaturally, driven by passions or simple plot necessities as they do.

This isn’t the masterpiece that “Loving Vincent” was and remains, the definitive Van Gogh biography told by painters honoring his works, visual subject matter and style. But “The Peasants” is an engaging way of taking us back to a simpler time when the people are just as petty, inconsiderate and greedy as people have always been and always will be.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Kamila Urzedowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Miroslaw Baka, Mateusz Rusin, Ewa Kasprzyk and Sonia Mietielica

Credits: Scripted and directed by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, based on the novel by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:55