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Sick Product of a Sick System

Sadly Over-hyped

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Close your eyes and think about the film Wuthering Heights, try to remember Olivier as Heathcliffe, the Yorkshire Moors swept with rain, fog and snow, and the forbidding house whose young master bullied Heathcliffe away and add Cathy's great performance. This film "The Innocents" captures the Spirit of Wuthering Heights in a post wartime Polish Monastery setting, this film portrays the liberation of Poland from the Nazis, who were supplanted by the vodka, vulgar and volva Russians, who raped the Nuns in this monastery causing several to become pregnant and bitterly ashamed of what had occurred, so much so that they shunned outside help, hid behind closed doors and walls, surrounded by the legacy of a wartime Poland ( Polish saying: Lifes bitter lessons I recall, I seem to remember them all) Aid arrives in the form of a French Doctor working locally for the French Red Cross, who solves their pressing problems. The Sound of Music this film ain't, its storyline is more powerful, more moving and another triumph for the French Film industry. A great film, a wonderful moving film, and a lesson in film making to all.

An amazing performance, music and cinematography! The film is very deep, absolutely intense emotional experience.

First thing I thought when I watch the movie was this: When your lose faith in the world, what can you do? what you can keep in your life before? That is the question the characters asked and tried to find the answer during the movie.Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laâge) just drop in the nunnery's life during the war, and find dreadful secret between the walls. She assisted the nuns to get them-self the horrible events in the past months. The movie presented women destiny in war circumstances. We see a doctor how to help people and tried to keep his profession, also we see women whose attempted to keep their faith, pureness and solemn promise to god. Two world to see in the movie, two different space and life. The first is the outside world we inlook a the Red Cross life in the eyes of a woman who work there. The other is the nunnery's world. This is a different lives, it closed full with rules. The events the happened in the past to query this. Women therein space struggle between two unalike thought. What can they do? To keep their faith before or give up and find another? Someone give up and live this life, some stay and keep going the old way. If you want to see women destiny and strong women characters you have to see this movie. In this movie have wonderful women characters.

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.