A compelling drama of wartime
The Innocents (Les innocentes) Monday, November 19, 7pm Davis Theatre, Whanganui Regional Museum
Anne Fontaine • France/ Poland/Belgium • 2016
115 mins • M sexual violence, suicide, content that may disturb
In French, Polish and Russian, with English subtitles
Based on a true story from postWorld War II Poland, this drama follows a young French doctor who finds herself caught up in the lives of nuns, traumatised and shamed by their wartime suffering.
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SYNOPSIS AND REVIEWS
Anne Fontaine’s compelling drama The Innocents illuminates events in Poland in the aftermath of World War II, placing women’s experiences of war at its centre. Mathilde (Lou de Laaˆ ge), a young doctor with the French Red Cross, is entreated by a desperate young nun to visit to a nearby abbey. She arrives to find a young sister in labour. Mathilde is soon drawn into the intensely private world of the nuns as they confide the nightmare of the “liberating” army that led to their predicament. Severely traumatised, some have refused to admit even to themselves that they are pregnant. Concealing her involvement from the Red Cross, Mathilde seeks allies in the convent where many remain cowed by a grim hierarchy determined to suppress all evidence of their “shame”. She also enlists the support of a colleague, a Jewish doctor whose hopes of impressing her must outweigh his bitter scepticism about Polish Catholic piety.
Elegantly shot and superbly performed in Polish and French, Fontaine’s war film eschews graphic depictions of violence to delineate and uphold the common humanity of those who foster renewal in its wake.
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“A gripping psychological drama based on events more than half a century old, The Innocents has inescapable contemporary echoes. Laced with intensely emotional situations, it refuses to force the issue by pushing too hard. And it proves, yet again, that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences.
Directing and co-writing this compelling Franco-Polish story of the nature of belief and the way war collapses the gap between the sacred and the profane is veteran French filmmaker Anne Fontaine. Inspired by the journal notes of Madeleine Pauliac, a young French Red Cross doctor who worked in Poland at the end of World War II, The Innocents has quite a story to tell, and in Fontaine it has a director who knows precisely how to tell it.
“The Innocents is set in December 1945, six months after the end of the European war, in a Poland occupied by Russian troops. It begins quietly, in a Benedictine convent during one of the community’s seven daily sung prayer sessions. These sounds are pure and transporting, and the film returns to them frequently to counterpoint the ugliness that defines the outside world. Suddenly, a woman screams, again and again. The nuns do not react, they’ve clearly heard it before, but when prayer is over a novice sneaks out and takes a long journey on foot to a nearby town in search of a doctor who is not Polish and definitely not Russian. Almost by chance the novice is directed to Mathilde (Lou de Laage), a French Red Cross doctor in the country to aid wounded French soldiers. Very reluctantly, Mathilde is convinced to return to the convent, where she meets the French-speaking Sister Maria and the convent’s iron-willed Mother Abbess and hears a horrifying story . . . “
- Kenneth Turan, LA Times ...
“This story feels almost unthinkably horrific. I put off watching The Innocents for weeks. But in the end, it’s an emotionally involving rather than harrowing film, with scenes as beautiful as oil paintings. At the start it’s almost impossible to tell the identically dressed, traumatised nuns apart. But gradually their personalities emerge. One nun is in denial, and won’t let Mathilde touch her. Another has lost her faith. A third is bonding with the life growing inside her. All are facing the agony of becoming mothers — how do they live with that? Sister Maria (Agata Buzek) who had a life in the world before joining the convent, copes best.”
- Cath Clark, Time Out