_{SUFFERING SISTERS. Inhumanity to women religious is at the heart of The Innocents. Mandarin Films}

 

The Innocents debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival under the title Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”), but apparently its French title was always Les Innocentes — a less overtly religious but more expressive title, applying to more than one set of people, and to more than one kind of innocence.

The film opens in a Benedictine convent in Poland in 1945, shortly after the event known, not without bitter irony, as the liberation of Poland by the Soviet army. As the nuns lift their voices in song, giving praise to God, a voice is heard making a rather different sound. In response, a young novice slips out of the convent and sets off across the snowy Polish countryside, seeking help of a specific sort.

She returns with a young French Red Cross doctor named Mathilde, who has been chosen because she is neither Polish nor Russian. It is not the first time the boundary between this convent and the world has been transgressed, and it was an earlier violation that makes the present trespass necessary.

Mathilde is also transgressing the rules of her own medical community, which she abandons without permission, depriving them of a vehicle as well as her own services, which even on her return she is too exhausted to render. What sorts of transgressions are morally called for, and what sorts are not, is one of The Innocents’ notable preoccupations.

Inspired by actual events, The Innocents is a wrenching drama about the human cost of what is often called man’s inhumanity to man, though it is often women and children who suffer most, as here.

It is also about making sense of suffering and how it relates to God, faith and doubt — a familiar theme, certainly, though as my friend and peer Jeffrey Overstreet points out, movies about faith and doubt almost always reflect a male perspective. Here is one that is not only dominated by female characters, but directed by a woman, Anne Fontaine, and filmed by another, Caroline Champetier. (The writing credits are complicated, but the two credited screenwriters are also women.)

With its Polish setting, post-World War II backdrop and muted palette at times approximating black and white, The Innocents evokes the luminous 2013 film Ida, which explored the frontier between cloistered and worldly life in a relationship between two women, one devout and the other unbelieving.

With several habited characters rather than just one, The Innocents is less schematic than Ida, but formal contrasts emerge: Where Ida featured a devout, naive young novice and Agata Kulesza (who appears in both films) as a disillusioned older Communist Party apparatchik, in The Innocents the secular woman, Mathilde (Lou de Laâge), is a young, idealistic communist, while Kulesza appears on the other side of the divide as the convent’s mother abbess, albeit with possibly more in common with her role in Ida than appears.

In Ida, the characters’ spiritual struggles were entirely interiorized; here, they’re discussed openly. “I can no longer reconcile my faith with these terrible events,” one sister confesses to another. “God, of whom I still consider myself the divine bride, nonetheless wanted this. … If it happened, that means he wanted it.”

The reply from the other sister is reassuring: “We cannot know what God wants” to happen, she says; “the only truth is his love.” Yet the specific circumstances in question are of a sort that tends to evoke God’s will with particular insistence. Later, a character rationalizes a terrible crime by appealing to Providence, though the crime in question is precisely of a sort accepted among the pagan Romans but condemned by the early Christians.

The Innocents explores both the divide and the commonality between Mathilde and the nuns. On the one hand, Mathilde is put off by the sense of shame hanging over the convent. One sister’s scruples are so severe that she recoils in fear of hell over allowing even a woman doctor to examine her body. Another, Sister Maria (Agata Buzek), has a more practical outlook and works hard to bridge the gap between the doctor and the sisters. (Unlike most of the others, Maria didn’t enter the convent as a virgin; still, she embraces religious life despite her worldly past.)

On the other hand, a terrible sequence in which the doctor is turned back at a Soviet checkpoint after being terrifyingly assaulted by laughing troops and is obliged to spend the night at the convent minimizes the divide between Mathilde and the nuns. To the eyes of brutal men, female bodies are objects of momentary male desire and pleasure, and for at least one night, the convent walls offer sanctuary even to the atheist doctor.

It is fair to say that The Innocents is more comfortable with Mathilde’s secularism than with even the balanced piety of Sister Maria. Still, the nuns’ way of life, though cross-examined in the most searching terms, is respected and even ultimately affirmed. The sisters have lost a kind of innocence, but made room for another, and the dominant note in the end is hopeful and life-affirming.

Steven D. Greydanus is the Register’s film critic and creator of Decent Films.