Platicsco
Good story, Not enough for a whole film
Console
best movie i've ever seen.
Suman Roberson
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
waleckijan
To Mrs Anne Fontaine (as finally responsible for what is said in the movie). In the one third of the movie when Mathilde (the beautiful) and French Jewish doctor Samuel played by Vincent Macaigne are in bed.She is asking him about Poles. His answer is: " They got what they deserved with Russians and the Germans"This is disgusting and unacceptable sentence if you care for the facts.I am requesting Mrs Anne Fontaine that this sentence will be taken out of the movie. Thank you Sincerely Jan Walecki I am waiting for prompt answer.Thank you
Bob An
Initially I gave this film a rating ten, but now I think it is worth nine. Nevertheless, the film is very good.What I liked the best is the setting and the mood of the film. It is quite dark, quite cold ( set in the winter which somehow give something chilly to the already chilly and horrible story) and quite claustophobic ( if I may say that - since the most of the film is done inside a monastery and rooms/cells inside it).The story is gripping and powerful. You can not really stay 'untouched' by the tragedies that the sisters have undergone. And although the scenes were not shown when it happened to them - the scene where it almost happened to the nurse was enough to get the glimpse of what must have been like.The actors were all great - sisters and the nurse especially. I had a bit of a trouble to 'get into' the main doctor's character. I understand French and his way of speaking and making sentences was quite quite strange. But I guess it is meant to be like that.I also liked it was a mix of Polish and French. I know French and Polish is similar in some ways to Serbian so it was also nice to compare some words.I do recommend this film. Though must say that winter time would be more suitable for watching it ( to really get into the atmosphere).
maurice yacowar
Anne Fontaine's The Innocents packs such an emotional wallop that you don't realize how many philosophical concerns can be unpacked in it.Medical assistant Mathilde moves between two worlds that can be read as opposing arenas of human service. In the field hospital she helps Jewish doctor Samuel treat survivors in 1945 Poland. That grisly physical world contrasts to the spiritual arena of the convent, where she is increasingly involved in serving the nuns of a meditational order. Several nuns were impregnated in three days of rape by Russian soldiers. When the nuns refuse her treatment they serve their literal commitment to a chastity in the face of their rape and pregnancy. Only in stages do they admit Mathilde to help one pregnant outcast, then for the nuns. Finally they have to admit the male doctor too — and he a Jew at that. The nuns strive to sustain their religious commands in the face of the profanity they have suffered. Reality doesn't allow for such a delusion of perfection. To preserve the convent's secret and protect the nuns from their dubious shame the Mother Superior has been abandoning the babies — with the pretence of leaving them at the foot of a cross in a snowy field, "for Providence" to protect them.As the soldiers have given the Mother Superior syphilis, she is physically poisoned as well as in her callous treatment of the innocent babies. But she is not an evil character. She earns respect when she admits she accepted her own damnation in order to save the convent and the nuns in her charge. She as much as the sacrificed babies is the victim of a religiosity that would sacrifice innocent lives to preserve itself. In that light she evokes the Vatican's collaboration with the Nazis and the failure to defend the Jews. Mother Superior is directly responsible for the one nun's suicide, in despair at her loss of her baby and her superior's conduct. As the nuns always refer to their boss as Mother this title suggests alternative values in maternity. By marrying Jesus nuns avoid secular marriage and its offspring. It takes the Russian soldiers' rapes to confront the nuns with the challenging experience of childbearing and motherhood. Their experience and the Mother Superior's callous response to it make the Mother Superior a false mother, a Mother Inferior. She abuses and betrays both classes of "innocents," the virgin nuns and the newborn babies. Mathilde solves the convent's problem by rejecting the church's imposition of secrecy, the convent's concerted attempt to close itself off from the world — as the heavy gate scenes impose—in favour of letting in the world and addressing its human needs. Mathilde suggests the convent take in the gaggle of street orphans and care for them. Then they can raise their babies among them. They hide their secret in proper public works instead of in shame. Thus Mathilde serves both the spiritual and the secular orders by valuing human needs over old dictates. Mathilde is herself briefly attracted to the convent life when she retreats there from her own near-rape by Russian soldiers. Their refuge is understandably appealing. She is also drawn to the beauty and serenity of their singing and the peace of their daily lives. All they do is maintain themselves, pray and sing. That's the reward of their faith. After the rape attempt Mathilde finds in the convent a welcome security. She can feel like a child again, secure in her father's protective grasp — until the dangers of reality and adulthood intrude. The nuns have felt that unnaturally prolonged security too — until the Russians' orgy. Their babies can be a reminder of their shame or — as Mathilde delivers them — a realization of an emotional life and commitment from which nuns are normally excluded. Here that's the superior motherhood.Of course that reality will continue to intrude. The film stops in 1945. Ahead for the Poles lies the Russian occupation, the repression of religion, the political threat to the personal and to the national soul. Despite the heart-warming family photo at the end, the film eschews a sentimental conclusion. One nun flees both the convent and motherhood. The Mother Superior's response to the womens' suffering and the very question of their God's allowing their abuse have cost her her calling. She abandon both callings, mother and nun, to find a new life in the world.
Victoria Weisfeld
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.
