Please don't spend money on this.

A Major Disappointment

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

In rural Poland just months after the end of World War II, the occupying Nazis have left and occupying Soviets have taken over. Mathilde (Lou de Laage) is a young doctor with the French Red Cross who is assigned to help wounded French soldiers. Maria (Agata Buzek) is a nun from a nearby convent who convinces Mathilde to assist members of her convent in great need of medical help due to a crisis that happened months before.I am being deliberately vague in the synopsis to avoid revealing a shocking spoiler in the film's beginning. I was fortunate not to know this detail and was very moved by the impact when it was revealed. The film is based on a true story. While the premise seems bizarre at first, it makes perfect sense later after one recalls the gruesome historical details of this place and time.Director Anne Fontaine was one of the film's screenwriters along with Sabrina Karine, Pascal Bonitzer, and Alice Vial. While there are some flaws in the story, most of it is very rich and very well executed by Fontaine's austere directing skills.While many individual stories are intriguing, it can be difficult to keep track of the many characters in the convent. In the latter half, there is a shocking action by the Mother Abbess (Agata Kuleza) that doesn't seem to make sense. It is possible to give the benefit of the doubt but there ought to have been an extended monologue in which the character explained her choice of action. There is a brief monologue but this doesn't seem to be enough.Despite these complaints, all other aspects of the story are fascinating. The characterizations of Mathilde and Maria are solidly written and portrayed. They both differ in faith (Mathilde, raised Catholic, is a non-believer) but they are very much alike in that they both risk getting in trouble with their respective organizations in order to answer a higher calling to help those in need. Their unlikely kinship is another enjoyable aspect of the story especially when they put their minds together at the end.There are other powerful scenes in which some of the nuns discuss varying degrees of faith. Some are losing it which is quite understandable under their circumstances. The film also explores broader issues such as having to live with one set of bullying occupiers (the Nazis) only to be liberated and have those bullies replaced with another set (the Soviets). The story also explores Poland's history of anti-Semitism. This is best reflected in the experiences and perspective of Samuel (Vincent Macaigne), a Jewish Frenchman who is Mathilde's senior colleague, friend, and occasional lover.It is tempting to compare this film with "Ida" (2013). They are both Polish films involving nuns and the aftermath of World War II. Kuleza also has a prominent role in both. Despite these similarities, both of these fine films are very distinct in their own ways.

One of the best movies of the year 2016, IMHO!!! Didn't get a lot of mention at Awards time, but certainly as important as a political comment on a true story as, say, Spotlight. The Russians have gotten an easy pass in the movie business, compared to the likes of Nazi Germany and Racist United States which have been turned every way but loose as far as getting raked over the coals by cinema.This quiet little story of Russian soldiers raping Polish nuns balances that trend in movies. Set after the war in 1945 as the Russians take over Poland, but the French Red Cross is still there, it's a reminder that there are always a few good people in the midst of the thugs. May the young French actress Lou de Laage have a long and happy career. She certainly has a good start here.Besides excellent acting and story telling, maybe it's the filming and mood created by this movie that makes it so good. You would think it painful to watch considering the subject, but it's not. Great shots of snowy, muddy roads and rambling old trucks offset by warm glow of music in a candle lit bar. Then the nuns, in a bleak cold stone refuge, yet in spite of their hardship, they are full of heart and life.

In case the 2013 movie Ida did not give you enough of a taste of the bleak Polish landscape post-World War II and the existential difficulties a young novice there may face, The Innocents gives a whole convent of them. The opening credits note the film is based on real events. These were documented by Madeleine Pauliac, a member of the French Resistance and a Red Cross doctor in charge of repatriating French soldiers scattered in camps and hospitals across Poland at the end of the war. Her nephew helped develop the movie, using her notes. French Director Anne Fontaine and a team of writers have brought to life this sensitive story of the aftermath of the country's "liberation" by the Soviet army. In the soldiers' point of view and with their commanders' encouragement, this meant enjoying the spoils of war. As a result, at least seven of the twenty or so Benedictine nuns in this isolated convent are pregnant. "What at first appears to be an austere, holy retreat from surrounding horrors is revealed to be a savagely violated sanctuary awash in fear, trauma and shame," says Stephen Holden in the New York Times. While the Sisters have taken vows to hide their bodies from the view and touch of others, when the babies start coming, life gets complicated. Childbirth is a terrifying physical, emotional, and most especially, spiritual crisis for the young nuns, who feel abandoned by God. Hearing her Sister's plaintive cries, a young novice runs to the nearby village in search of a doctor who is not Polish and not Russian. She finds an aid station staffed by the French Red Cross. Will the young doctor Mathilde (modeled on Pauliac in a stirring and subtle performance by Lou de Laâge) help? Will she be allowed to? What will become of these babies? Keeping the children would bring scandal down on the heads of the nuns, whose situation is precarious, given the post-war privations, the suppression of the Church by Poland's new Communist regime, and popular prejudice against illegitimate babies and unwed mothers, regardless of circumstances. They are sitting ducks. While you might be tempted to think of this movie as a period piece, wars with rape as a tactic continue today, with the young women victims often ostracized from their communities and families. The stern Mother Abbess (Agata Kulesza, also in the cast of Ida) swears Mathilde to secrecy about the births, but is quietly frantic they will be discovered. The Mother Abbess has her own probably fatal post-rape difficulty, but this is inconsequential compared to her fear for the loss of her soul. Acting as intermediary, Sister Maria (Agata Buzek), serves as translator, though the cultural divide remains almost unbridgeable. Says Christy Lemire in Rogerebert.com, Mathilde, the non-believer, is "a voice of reason in a place of sacred mystery." The fine acting in this movie helps it maintain a quiet dignity and lack of sentimentality about this whole ugly business. In French and Polish, with subtitles.

The frequent attention that WWII and its consequent problems has received on cinema is suffocating. Les Innocent, however, is one film that goes further, beyond the French Occupation, the megalomaniac character of the first half of 20th century political leaders, the dramatic tales of the Jews, the destruction and radicalism based on nationalisms, and so on. This time is all about a silent, intimate and confronting story developed in a polish convent. The role of woman in the war society has a special attention this time, from two different perspectives: the new free women that can decide her own destiny and find its best metaphor in the French Marianne; the second one, the centenary image of the catholic sacred women, the virgin. These two characters, which embody very well some of the tensions that were deliberated during the world war period, find a perfect justification this time on the dialogues, silences and actions. The polish has been a traditional segregated population and, somehow, this nation has found its historical version on the figure of the European martyr. So, we have an intense, but predictable, argument between these two evocations of a women. Marianne is obviously characterized by a French woman, who is always willing to attend others, who finds its better version on a nurse. Her conflicts end up always with a condescending gesture. She is made to represent the good between an ocean of evil, but with the French usual hostility. But the spectator loses its distance from the world context very easily, because of the intimate voice of the film. The virginal victims are in the middle of a complex scenario, in which violence is expressed on every little action. But this portray of the WWII has a common place that we, the occidental spectators, are very used to. The evil soviets, closer to madness than ever before, carriers of a voluptuous and dark behaviour. At this point, the idea is well exposed: Marianne rescues and supports the oppressed nations, the martyrs, by the horrible and destructive hands of Stalin. One more time, we see the same stereotype on the screen. Nevertheless, it is important to say that beyond this argumentative political line, which is subtly exposed, there are very rich elements that make of this one a remarkable film. Not because of the predictable approach it has, but because of the portray of a very moving case which is worthy to be seen. The photography stablishes a constant dialogue with the interior dramas of the nuns. The sound has a very powerful role, which is complemented with the excellent acting skills of the women. It is poetical when it demands to be.