Set mainly in a Polish convent in 1945 and loosely based on a true story, The Innocents is austerely and beautifully shot by cinematographer Caroline Champetier (Of Gods and Men) in a palette dominated by black, white and grey. Morally, too, it is full of shadows: secrets and shame, profound trauma and the quiet struggle for survival.
The film begins with the mysterious sound of a woman howling from deep in the convent as the nuns are at prayer, a howl that triggers an unauthorised dash by a novice to find a doctor who is neither Polish nor Russian.
A young woman from the French Red Cross, Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laâge) reluctantly answers the plea – at great personal risk – and discovers the secret that the Mother Superior (Agata Kulesza) is hiding. Months before, the convent was attacked by Red Army soldiers, and the nuns subjected to multiple rapes. Seven are now on the verge of giving birth, and the Mother Superior eventually agrees that Mathilde can return to assist with their labours, provided she tells no one.
The director Anne Fontaine conveys an era of terrible and chaotic drama in a compellingly understated style. The wider landscape remains unpredictable – the nuns still live in acute fear of Russian soldiers – and atrocities are fresh in the mind. The steep cost exacted by the war is borne by various characters in different ways: Mathilde’s co-worker and lover Samuel, for example, is a Jewish doctor who lost his parents in Bergen-Belsen.
Yet the story concentrates most closely on the dilemmas endured by the nuns, whose extreme modesty and vows of chastity are complicating factors in the shock of impending motherhood as a result of rape.
The film poses some painful questions, particularly with regard to the character of the Mother Superior: when does piety harden into rigidity, and devotion to God slip towards a horrifying abandonment of humanity? The script wisely withholds clunking judgments in favour of allowing a seeping chill to establish itself at the convent’s core, which eventually prompts a revolt against authority from one nun in particular (played by Agata Buzek).
After so much psychological complexity, the plot’s conclusion feels a little too tidily parcelled, as though a wand has suddenly been waved to banish difficulty and doubt. Yet the film’s lasting force derives both from strong performances and the way it lays bare the texture of things. The puny, silky newborns that appear in the convent, demanding the right to be heard, exert an elemental power both for the audience and for the young nuns, in whom they stir a range of crises and emotions – the disruptive, irresistible tug of clean life, even in the aftermath of cruelty and death.
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