The Innocents is a spare and intensely focused movie about nuns in rural Poland at the very end of World War II, December 1945. There’s little talk. The nuns sing at prayer time, but otherwise the film provides almost no music. The nuns live in a convent that looks old. As if it’s always been a church building; it’s a space full of arches and arch-like features on the walls – you can’t avoid feeling the constant presence of the church, and neither can the nuns.
The story takes place in winter. While the convent is mostly bare stone and minimal comfort, it’s a crucial refuge compared to the gray snowy world outside, where there’s nothing but the snowy forest, ramshackle buildings, suffering humanity and a bunch of young orphans who demand money for things like giving minor directions. There’s not much joy here. The winter light sucks the color from the world; yet the profound ancient chanting of the nuns, and the fierce white and black of their habits brings some life to this place. Everything else looks like gray mud.
A French Red Cross unit has converted an old mansion into a make-shift hospital where they attend to nameless and faceless people with grisly wounds and conditions. A nun rushes through the forest to bring a French nurse to the convent. Seven of the nuns are pregnant. The reason? The Soviet troops who liberated this part of Poland raped most of the women. The pain for these nuns goes beyond the horror of the repeated attacks. Their pregnancies drive them to question their religious beliefs and their discipline as nuns. Many of the women believe that they have sinned and violated their vows of chastity.
The young nurse is Mathilde (Lou de Laâge), who looks as if all lightness has been stolen from her face, and that’s even before she learns of the rapes. She works with Samuel, a French-Jewish doctor (Vincent Macaigne). They’re lovers, but until they’re in bed together, you’d think they just had scorn for each other. The movie seals off their tiny shared jolts of genuine delight with what looks like distrust and resentment.
The pregnancies leave the nuns adrift in their reactions – some pretend they’re not pregnant, some ignore it. They’re at a loss over what to do with the babies. There’s no church government to guide them, and there’s no civil government at all. The Soviet army must be in charge somehow, but those soldiers are more like gangs than an army. Samuel the doctor is overwhelmed with cases and the penicillin is running out. Mathilde the nurse is out of her league – she manages a cesarean section all on her own and then has to argue with a nun who believes that herbs will ward off any possible infection.
The Innocents is so understated and so thoroughly ambiguous that you just pour yourself into it.
At first it’s like the nun who loses her way in the forest. She can find no landmarks, the overgrown paths seem to lead nowhere. Yet something holds these women together. They find ways to comfort each other, to provide at least a minimal support. The women find strength among themselves, and even though Samuel comes to help, it’s not as if a bunch of disorganized women found a man to bail them out. The doctor's personal grief has left him as lost as anyone, but he comes with goodwill and some skills. Even though he admits he’s a man, a doctor and a Jew, he manages to fit in a little bit.
The Innocents literally dives deep into the muck and slime of human life, but it’s an elegant movie – especially if you just ignore the silly feel-good ending.
