The Innocents -- Film Review

The Innocents

Directed by Anne Fontaine

This is a very compassionate, human story about small side horror of World War 2.  Toward the end of the war in 1945 a Polish convent was ransacked by invading Russian soldiers.  The soldiers took up residence with them and spent several days gang raping all the nuns.  The result was many of them became pregnant and the Mother Superior contracted syphilis.  One of the younger wayward nuns broke with protocol and found her way to the French Red Cross and summoned help.  A young female doctor (Lou de Laâge) visits the convent and discovers the secret that they are at great pains to hide. 

The drama that plays out throughout the film is the clash between the attitudes and values of the Catholic Church and the human needs brought about by this extraordinary situation.  The Catholic outlook on life and its approach to dealing with the problem at hand does not fare too well.  The film portrays quite well the hopeless inadequacy of Catholic thinking and values for coping with human problems involving the body and sex, especially pertaining to women.  Its severity, its ultraconservatism, its cruelty, callousness, and intransigence are frankly presented with the stark consequences evident.  However, the nuns themselves are treated with great sensitivity and compassion.  Beneath the flowing habits and regimented life each nun is an individual with differing backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives on Catholic teaching and their own interpretations and struggles with their faith.  The fact that many of them are having babies in short succession creates havoc among this staid order. 

I liked that the secular female doctor and the Jewish male doctor emerge as heroine and hero of the story.  The Mother Superior, who represents the conservative traditional thinking of the Church, becomes something of a villain who kills a number of the newborn babies, while lying to the group that she had placed the infants with family members of some of the nuns.  Modern scientific medicine is decisively triumphant over Catholic methods of prayer and resignation to the will of God.  In every respect the Catholic outlook, values, and attitudes come off as inadequate, obstructionist, and even inhuman.  While representing Catholic nuns sympathetically as human beings caught in a monstrous situation that befell them quite unbidden, the film is severely anti-Catholic. 

There is another running subtext in this story, although not emphasized, and that is the matter of rape.  The nuns are repeatedly raped by the invading Russian soldiers.  (This was before the movie happened.)  Mathilde, the Red Cross doctor, is assaulted and nearly raped by the Russian soldiers who stop her at a roadblock.  She is rescued and sent on her way by a Russian officer.  The Russian soldiers are portrayed as animals, and many of them undoubtedly were.  But it was a Russian officer who delivered Mathilde.   Mathilde is also aggressively prevailed upon by her fellow doctor and colleague, Samuel Lehmann.  In the end she apparently concedes and cooperates, but there is resistance that is insistently overcome.  Is a message being presented that rape is an inherent element in male-female relationships that warfare only liberates and magnifies?  It is clear, and has always been the case, that the women of a conquered enemy can expect very little mercy from the conquering soldiers.  Conquering soldiers feel they are doing them a favor by not killing them.  They belong to the spoils of the battle and are a reward and a motivator of common soldiers.  Only very recently have political considerations begun to take a stand against this ancient practice of handing the conquered women over to the unrestrained lusts of the victorious soldiers.  I am not going to treat this issue at length because it would require an extensive discussion, and this film is not preoccupied with the matter of rape, but rather with its aftermath and the excruciating conflict it created in an ascetic order of nuns.  But it is there for those who are interested.  I merely wish to note it and not pass over it.  There is quite a lot of substance in this film, and in the characters portrayed. 

When Mathilde is driving back from the convent for the last time she comes upon one of the young nuns walking along the road at night who has decided to leave the convent and she gives her a lift.  She tells Mathilde that she has left her baby in the care of the nuns and wants to leave all of that behind.  She adds, "I want to live."  It is a telling remark.  The convent is a place for those who don't want to live, who have turned away from life.  They have withdrawn from life into this minimal existence of rigid structure, asceticism, and severe discipline.  The film captures it all very well, and comes down decisively on the side of the modern secular, erotic woman, whose life is filled with work, service to others, and sexual relationships with men.  It is an interesting, moving story very well presented.  It is in French, as well as some Russian and Polish, with subtitles.