Movie Review—The Innocents

by Peter J. O'Connell

The Innocents. Released (USA): July 2016. Runtime: 115 mins. MPAA rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic material, including sexual assault, and for some bloody images and brief suggestive content. Dialogue in French, Polish and Russian; subtitled in English. 

Poland, late 1945. In the wintry land, ravaged first by German conquest and then by Soviet domination, a French medical team is winding up its stay treating injured French prisoners of war. A homeless orphan persuades Mathilde, a young French doctor, to meet with a nun. The nun implores Mathilde to come to her convent secretly to treat one of the sisters. Mathilde is reluctant because she is supposed to treat only the French military, but she yields to the nun's pleas. 

When Mathilde arrives at the convent, she is shocked to find that she is expected to deliver a baby from a nun who was raped when the Red Army swept through Poland earlier in the year. And that nun is not the only one of the sisters who was raped—and not the only one who is pregnant.

So begins The Innocents, directed by Anne Fontaine, a moving parable of the interaction of faith, fate-- and forms of feminism. Mathilde, sensitively played by the lovely Lou de Laage, is from a family of French communists. She is not one herself and is opposed to the brutality of the Soviet and Polish communists, but she is a rationalist and finds the traditionalist attitudes of most of the nuns difficult to understand. 

The sisters worry that they have broken their vows of chastity, even though they were the victims of sexual assault. They are troubled by the fate thrust upon them but manage to achieve a sense of transcendence, especially when they engage in their beautiful chanting and singing. As more births occur, Mathilde is called on again and again and finds herself developing affection and respect for the nuns—her “sisters”--because of the solidarity that the members of the convent show for each other. 

Mathilde's relationship with Mother Abbess (Agata Kulesza), the head of the convent, is more problematic. Mother Abbess is very stern. She takes away the babies as soon as they are born but says that she has found good homes for them. Mother Abbess' assistant (Agata Buzek) is more flexible.

Things also are problematic at the French medical station. Samuel (Vincent Macaigne), a doctor there, is very taken with Mathilde, but his approach to her is a mix of forwardness and hesitation. Mathilde likes Samuel but also longs for an independent way of life. Neither Mathilde, because of her communist family background, nor Samuel, who is Jewish, are looked on with favor by the French commander (Pascal Elso), who is a right-winger.

Anne Fontaine's skillful direction keeps the film's various plot lines moving in credible and complementary ways. The French members of her cast are nuanced in their performances, and the Polish actresses are marvels of controlled intensity. The film's cinematography of rural Poland in winter mixes the colors of black, white and gray together marvelously—whether focusing on nature, building interiors or the nuns' garb—just as the film's thematic development mixes moral blacks, whites and grays together as the work moves toward its stunning denouement. 

The Innocents is one of the finest films that that you could hope to see in this, or any, year.