LES INNOCENTES –
THE INNOCENTS – AGNUS DEI – 2016
An extremely disquieting and
disturbing film at first that turns pacified and pacifying in the end.
Imagine Poland in 1945 liberated by the Soviet Union but practically occupied BY THE Soviet army,
waiting for some Polish government to come into power. Imagine a nunnery, a
convent in other words, with nuns being searched by rough Soviet soldiers who
search everything particularly the nuns and not with their fingers, mind you,
and these rough visitors leave seven of them pregnant and one with syphilis
(the abbess). Imagine a mission of the French Red Cross there, under the
command of a Colonel who used to be an extreme right militant before the war,
with a Jewish doctor, the last survivor of his family, and his assistant, a
young woman from a communist family.
The woman and then the man get
involved in the situation in the convent in spite of the abbess who is a
fundamentalist and imposes rules from another time: the nuns are not supposed
to show their body and be touched physically, even by a female doctor. The
rapes are a stain, a sin and the nuns are made to feel guilty about it: the
trauma of the rape is turned into an inescapable practically unhealable form of
psychotic PTSS. Seven children will be born. The first two will be taken by the
abbess and she will – in absolute secret – entrust them back to God, in other
words expose them in order for them to die. She commits a crime that is also a
sin (Thou shalt not kill) in order to cover the situation. She is discovered as
a murderess by the other nuns in time for the last five children to be born and
saved by one younger nun who is the actual caretaker of the convent and who can
count on the help of the French communist lady doctor.
The end is optimistic. The
convent is turned into an orphanage. They host orphans living or surviving in
the street and that covers up the fact that the babies are the children of
rape.
If the end is maybe too
optimistic the film shows very well what happened in Poland from 1943 to 1946. The
Soviet army was ruthless as soon as it moved west pushing the Germans back. It
took absolutely no prisoners among the German troops, which I know from experience
due to the testimony of my mother-in-law whose first husband was a lieutenant
in the Wehrmacht on the Polish front in 1944. At the same time they got rid –
or let the Germans get rid – of the Jews from the ghetto in Warsaw. In the meantime they trapped the
remnants of some Polish liberation army and managed to have them all shot in
some forest east and they respected no rights of no Pole. Looting, pillaging
and raping were the little brothers and sisters of the big siblings WAR and NO QUARTER.
Supreme Lord have mercy on us. We have to think of Led Zeppelin’s song:
Close the door, put out the light.
You know they won't be home tonight.
The snow falls hard and don't you know?
The winds of Thor are blowing cold.
They're wearing steel that's bright and true
They carry news that must get through.
They choose the path where no-one goes.
They hold no quarter.
Walking side by side with death,
The devil mocks their every step
The snow drives back the foot that's slow,
The dogs of doom are howling more
They carry news that must get through,
To build a dream for me and you
They choose the path where no-one goes.
They hold no quarter.
They ask no quarter.
The pain, the pain without quarter.
They ask no quarter.
The dogs of doom are howling more!
And out of that carnage and mess
a government will come up under the leadership of the Polish United Workers’
Party, in other words a quasi communist party, supported by the Soviet Union
and this government will tolerate and let live the Catholic Church and its institutions,
including convents and monastery. So the happy ending might be considered as
possible. But the whole of Europe went through
the worst imaginable traumatic experience in those years, which is still
surviving today in the European consciousness and culture.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:15 AM