IN DARKNESS directed by Agnieszka Holland, written by David F Shamoon from the book by Robert Marshall, with Robert Wieckiewicz and Maria Schrader. 145 minutes. Subtitled. A Mongrel release. Opens Friday (February 17). For venues and times, see Movies.
Holocaust imagery is now almost hackneyed, and stories about the terrible trauma border on kitsch.
So says Agnieszka Holland, who’s tired of predictable representations of the victims and perpetrators of the Second World War slaughter. Not all the victims were angels, and not all Poles happily turned in every Jew they could find.
Her insistence on honouring complexity drives In Darkness, her Oscar-nominated story about a Polish worker who helped several Jews hide in the sewers of Lvov (then Polish, now in the Ukraine) during the Nazi occupation.
She allows that in the past two decades, thanks to the mass media – Schindler’s List, for example – and the establishment of Holocaust museums, awareness of the period has deepened.
“But at the same time, the representations are sentimental,” she says in her strong Polish accent while relaxing in a hotel room during last year’s Toronto Film Festival whirlwind. “They’ve almost got the dimensions of a comic book story.”
She’s particularly annoyed by Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.
“It was like a lesson, that if you really love your child you can save him. But that’s not the lesson at all. All those people loved their children and could not save them.”
In telling her story, Holland insists on giving her Jewish characters more complexity. One of the startling aspects of In Darkness is the open eroticism of the imperilled Jews. Before they go underground, they’re living in terror yet remain fully sexually alive. Even in close quarters in the sewers, adultery rules.
She cites the reminiscences of cardiologist Marek Edelman, last survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, who died in 2009, as a major inspiration.
“He recalls that they were fucking all the time,” she says. “That’s what kept them alive: laughter, sex, sensuality.
“There were rich Jews, poor Jews, sexual conflicts. Jews are like all people. There are good and bad, weak and strong, brave and cowardly. It irritated me that they were portrayed as holy figures. That denies them the right to be human in a multi-dimensional way.”
Holland says people have been so inundated with Holocaust images – pictures of Jews wearing yellow stars lined up in the streets, or as skeletal prisoners – that they’ve almost become inured to it.
So she was committed to one particularly terrifying sequence portraying the slaughter of female prisoners by Nazi soldiers. It’s a jarring moment filmed in the open air, whereas over half the movie is shot in extremely tight spaces. And the sight of scores of naked women running for their lives through the forest is unforgettable.
“We were looking for images that would penetrate and stay with you,” says Holland. “I had to fight for the scene, because some German producers were offended. It was a good test for me. A German person involved in a subject like this can’t stay emotionally indifferent. When it gets too real and too true, they want to push it away.
“They’ll accept a clichéd vision, but when it’s too real they are afraid of it.”
susanc@notoronto.com
