Les innocentes
Anne Fontaine (2016)
Poland, December 1945. The devotional chanting in a convent is accompanied by – competes with – a woman’s cries of pain. Outside a Red Cross mission in the same locality, Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laâge), a young medical student working with the mission in the immediate aftermath of World War II, is approached by a nun with an urgent plea for help. Neither speaks the other’s language and Mathilde doesn’t at first understand what she’s being asked to do but she decides to accompany the nun to the convent, and finds a young woman in labour there. It’s a breech birth and Mathilde successfully carries out a caesarean to deliver the baby. Mathilde learns from the bilingual Sister Maria (Agata Buzek) that, early in the year, Soviet soldiers invaded the convent and raped the nuns. The woman whose baby Mathilde has delivered is one of seven sisters who became pregnant as a result of the attack, and the first to give birth.
Much of the drama of Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents derives from these extraordinary collisions between the secluded spiritual world of the convent and its invasion by the real world outside – in the forms of both the soldiers’ brutal incursion and Mathilde’s obstetric assistance. The work she does in the convent is challenging. Her presence there is not welcomed by the Mother Superior (Agata Kulesza). Some of the pregnant nuns, traumatised by what the soldiers did to them, are frightened to have their bodies touched or examined; others object to this as a matter of religious principle. The convergence in the place of male intervention and medical investigation is given a sharp new focus later in the story, when Samuel Lehmann (Vincent Macaigne), a doctor in the Red Cross unit who also becomes Mathilde’s lover, accompanies her to the convent to treat the mothers-to-be. The fundamental anomaly of the situation – a nunnery that is also a maternity ward – is realised very effectively, not least in the way these brides of Christ look upon their newborns. The looks suggest natural maternal feelings veiled by furtiveness – by a guilty awareness that the nuns are having an experience they shouldn’t be having. Michael Wood describes the story’s riddle well in his review in the London Review of Books:
‘What is a nun, and what is a baby, and why can’t they live in the same house? I don’t think the film wants for a moment to suggest that the rape of a nun is more awful than the rape of anyone else. But it is clearly haunted by the incongruity of the event, as if it were a category mistake or a terrible joke as well as a moral horror.’
In the first part of the film, the soldiers’ actions cast a long shadow. Anne Fontaine handles this very well. She’s right not to include a flashback to the rapes: to do so would, as well as being in questionable taste, involve images liable to eclipse the carefully developed description of life in the convent – its routines and how these are affected by the violation that’s occurred. Instead, Fontaine includes a sequence in which Mathilde, cycling back from the convent to the Red Cross centre after dark, is stopped by a Soviet patrol. Its members are well on the way to raping Mathilde too until her screams are heard by the soldiers’ commanding officer. He orders the men to stop, without himself showing any personal sympathy towards Mathilde. The episode, shocking in itself, prompts us to imagine the horror of what happened in the convent.
As The Innocents continues, however, it’s not the rapists but the religious institution itself – specifically, the Mother Superior’s rule – that seems to emerge as the principal pathological force. Although the idea of organised religion as a moral aberration isn’t hard for a present-day audience to accept, serious difficulties arise from the way in which the film turns the abbess into the sole embodiment of abhorrent, in-the-name-of-God traditionalism, and the melodramatic consequences of her mindset. She tells the other nuns that the newborns are being given to local families for adoption – in at least one case, to the family of the nun who gave birth to the baby – but one of the nun-mothers, Sister Zofia (Anna Próchniak), discovers what Mother Superior is really up to. She takes the babies to woodland close to the convent and leaves them there, exposed to the wintry elements and certain to perish. We seem meant to think that the abbess is motivated by a determination to conceal, at all costs, the scandal of the nuns giving birth: there’s a resonance here, of course, with the currently topical theme of the hushing up of sex scandals by Catholic powers-that-be. But Mother Superior’s actions and unmasking are unsatisfactory in several ways. This is a woman who is sufficiently pragmatic and morally compromising to allow her charges to receive medical care, albeit reluctantly, and who, when Soviet soldiers pay another call to the convent, endorses the lie Mathilde tells them that the place is quarantined as a result of a typhus outbreak. It’s puzzling as to how the abbess has managed the babies’ ‘adoptions’ quite independently of any of the other nuns, or how she went on earlier woodland outings unnoticed. Zofia, after seeing the grim little cemetery-in-the-making, decides not to confide in anyone else but to commit suicide in garishly spectacular fashion. And when the abbess’s deception and infanticide eventually come to light, the other nuns reject her quickly and completely – only one appears at all conflicted in renouncement of her. Yet she’s been presented, up to this point, as an irresistibly influential leader.
The Mother Superior was among those raped by the soldiers. As a result, she is infected, and terminally ill, with syphilis but the film implies that she’s also dying from a moral corruption that’s eating her away from inside: this dual morbidity is a case of having it both ways. The abbess believes that her pernicious deeds have condemned her soul to eternal damnation but this is no more than a bit of Gothic colouring in the narrative. Not surprisingly so: it’s extremely difficult for a Western film-maker nowadays to make sense of a character’s religious vocation, let alone animate their eschatological beliefs. While the nuns’ easy rejection of the abbess and all she represents isn’t psychologically convincing, it clearly expresses Anne Fontaine’s relief in moving the convent and its inmates, at a stroke, from the middle ages into a modern ethos more understandable and more palatable to twenty-first century sensibilities. With benighted Mother Superior out of the way (and winter turning to spring), the new regime readily accepts Mathilde’s bright idea of turning the convent into an orphanage – a means of both giving refuge to young war orphans in the vicinity and passing off the newborns as orphans too. The Innocents ends with the nuns and their babes-in-arms posing for a smiling group photograph, which Sister Maria sends to Mathilde, now returned to France, with a message expressing thanks and Maria’s conviction that Mathilde, although not herself a believer, was sent to the nuns by God. Two of the nun-mothers leave the place entirely – one of them gives birth after the abbess has been exposed so her baby survives and leaves the convent with her. Like her colleagues, this young woman has struggled to make sense of how God allowed the nuns to be subjected to the ordeal they’ve endured. She says that she now understands that it was God’s holy will that she become a mother.
In giving Sister Maria and this other nun the last words, Anne Fontaine seems to be trying to avoid throwing out the ‘nice’ religious baby with the ‘nasty’ religious bathwater. This, in combination with the happy family photograph, is a virtual acknowledgement that Fontaine has decided to back away from the troubling moral and theological issues she’s raised. Although she can’t be expected to resolve those issues and while most people who go to see the film will tend to sympathise intellectually with this change of direction, the ending still feels like a letdown. Even so, The Innocents is far superior to Coco Before Chanel, the only other Anne Fontaine movie I’ve so far seen. The cinematography is by Caroline Champetier, whose work on another picture about a religious community, Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men, was similarly impressive. The visual scheme verges on monochrome. This is apt for the moral severities of the story and its setting, and reinforced by the snow-covered, bare-treed landscape outside the convent. Champetier’s limited palette has the effect of making you more sensitive to the flesh tones and khaki uniforms. The folds of their headdresses, in combination with the calm immobility of their expressions, sometimes give the nuns the look of statuary – in sharp contrast to their sisters’ anguish in the delivery room. The Innocents is ‘based on true events’, though we can only guess, of course, which of the events in the film actually occurred. (According to Wikipedia, the screenplay, by Sabrina B Karine, Pascal Bonitzer, Fontaine and Alice Vial, derives from an ‘original idea’ by Philippe Maynial, based ‘on the experiences of his aunt, the French Red Cross doctor Madeleine Pauliac in Poland after World War II’.) This French-Polish-Belgian co-production had a working title of Agnus Dei. It’s been released in some countries with that title, in others as The Innocents or Les innocentes. The English form could refer both to the nuns and to their babies (connoting Herod’s ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’) though the French form is specifically feminine.
The actresses playing Mathilde and Sister Maria present images of complementary beauty but neither is strongly expressive. Although it could be argued that, in Maria’s case, this opacity is right for a character whose chosen way of life will be unfathomable to many viewers, it’s hard to believe from Agata Buzek’s playing of her that Maria was ever the goer she claims to have been before she entered the convent. (Hard to believe too that the red dress she still owns, as if to prove her party-girl past, would fit Lou de Laâge’s differently proportioned Mathilde, to whom Maria lends the garment.) In spite of the unconvincing aspects of the abbess and the use the film makes of her, Agata Kulesza is a formidable presence in the role. The Mother Superior eventually takes to her bed and, in a memorable final moment, turns her head to the wall, giving up the ghost. It’s something of an irony that the most credible person in The Innocents is male: Samuel Lehmann is the best written as well as the best played character in the story. A Jew whose whole family has been wiped out in the course of the war years, Samuel is convincingly complicated: in his mixture of arrogance and sensitivity towards Mathilde; in his callous remark about Polish Gentiles deserving whatever they get from the occupying Soviets and his compassionate professional humanitarianism. Vincent Macaigne is excellent in capturing these ambiguities. As they go together to the convent, Samuel says to Mathilde that he never imagined that ‘I, a French Jew, would tend to Polish nuns knocked up by Russian pigs’. The utterance has a human reality that’s both startling and funny. It supports Michael Wood’s argument in his LRB piece that this gruelling drama is also, at one level, a singular comedy.
23 November 2016
