Director salves old wounds

MICHAEL FOX

In the last few decades, German and French filmmakers – reflecting and, in some cases, bravely advancing national attitudes – have examined the Holocaust with both blunt candidness and shades-of-grey maturity.

Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s profoundly responsible and beautifully made In Darkness – now playing in Vancouver – represents a rare cinematic attempt to address the Poles’ unhappy participation in the Second World War. Based on the actual experiences of Polish Jews, like her mentor Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, Holland’s film traces the evolving arrangement between an amoral Polish sewer worker and the dozen or so Jews he agrees to hide underground and feed – for a price – after the liquidation of the Lvov ghetto. It was an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film (along with Israeli director Joseph Cedar’s Footnote).

Its enormous historical value and exceptional artistic merits aside, In Darkness represents an opportunity to acknowledge and reduce the tension between Poles and Jews surrounding the Holocaust.

“There was a lot of hidden guilt [among the Poles] and, from the Jewish side, a feeling of deep betrayal,” Holland said in a phone interview. “So [the Jews] were much angrier with the Poles than they were with the Germans.”

The lingering and unresolved ill will on both sides stemmed from a fundamental difference in perception: the Poles saw themselves as victims of Nazi brutality and as occasional rescuers of the Jews. To most Jews, the Poles were collaborators or, at best, opportunists. At some point in In Darkness, the compromised, erstwhile hero – sewer worker and thief Leopold Socha – fulfils every one of those roles.

“I cannot heal the relationship, but I can open people’s hearts and minds,” Holland said. “The moment when the antisemitism stops is when you see the human being in the Jew and, when the Jew can see the human being in the Pole, it’s a step forward.”

Holland’s father was Jewish, and she previously explored antisemitism, morality and survival in her amazing, epic 1990 film Europa, Europa. The 60-something director, whose resumé includes episodes of various HBO series, was well aware that she was re-entering dark, challenging territory.

“Anytime you go deep into this subject – I read a lot of documents new to me, because I wasn’t so familiar with this situation in Lvov – it’s a painful process,” she confided. “It’s in your dreams. It makes you depressed. Doing a movie like that influences your entire system.”

In Darkness opened in Poland in January to ticket sales that surprised Holland and her producers. Moreover, she reported, the audience was mostly young.

“For a long time, the Poles didn’t want to face the truth about some parts of the truth but, in the last 10 years, it changed quite quickly with [the publication of] some books,” Holland explained. “Some younger Polish historians are extremely honest about the subject. It worked out a lot of very painful emotions.”

The effect is most noticeable among the next generation, Holland said.

“When you are speaking to young Polish people today, they are really interested in the truth,” she declared. “Another side effect is many more of them see the Righteous Among the Nations as heroes. There was a time when they had to hide.”

An earnest, generally unsmiling woman, Holland allowed that In Darkness offers a glimmer of light.

“I’m not an optimist generally [but] some type of healing in this relationship is possible,” she said. “Poland is one of Israel’s closest allies now.”

Fight for survival – A review of In Darkness

When the Nazis brutally emptied the Lvov ghetto in 1943, a small group of Polish Jews had several frantic seconds to make a life-or-death choice: the hell above or the hell below.

Following orders meant deportation to the death camps, although they didn’t know that. All they could be certain of was that the Nazis didn’t have their best interests in mind. The only option was vanishing into the stinking sewer system underneath the city, with their small children and some valuables, and dealing with survival a day at a time.

Agnieszka Holland’s brilliantly executed real-life drama, In Darkness, is a quintessential example of the current state of the Holocaust film. More than 60 years after the war, filmmakers have shifted their focus from documenting history to examining human behavior under extreme stress.

In Darkness is a riveting story based on Robert Marshall’s 1991 nonfiction book In the Sewers of Lvov. Holland’s goal, however, isn’t to bring to light (pun intended) these specific events so much as to highlight every shade of grey in what is a morally complex and harrowing drama.

The Jews aren’t saintly victims but flawed individuals understandably prone to bickering, paranoia and selfishness. It’s an unhappy cross-section, comprised of a couple of strong, street-smart ones willing to fight, a religiously observant man and a family with the financial means to pay someone to supply food.

That someone is a non-Jewish sewer worker and grafter, a man of no allegiances named Leopold Socha who’s uncommonly skilled at assessing and plundering the rubble of war. He agrees to supply the Jews with food for a price, but, even though he’s taking a huge risk, they harbor no illusions that he’s anything but a mercenary.

Socha is the movie’s fulcrum, for he is the one character who can freely (up to a point, given the Nazis’ presence) move above and below ground, crossing between the light and the darkness. The metaphor is unmistakable: Socha’s movement and actions are physical, but they reflect a flexible moral code.

Along with the continuous question of whether the Jews in the sewers will survive, this is the crux of the film. Socha ends up representing every role that Poles played during the Holocaust: collaborator, victim, opportunist and rescuer.

The real fascination of In Darkness, narrative tension notwithstanding, is watching Holland navigate the nuances of Socha’s behavior without apologizing for or excusing the Poles. She’s equally rigorous about avoiding simplistic and comforting scenes, as the film gradually morphs into a tale of deepening trust on both sides, the kind that’s earned when people do more than what’s required of them.

In Darkness is a movie in which every character’s decisions, no matter how unlikable or unfortunate, are completely understandable. One consequence is that it’s impossible to watch In Darkness without contemplating what you would have done in similar circumstances. Instead of leaving us with pat endings and familiar emotions, it prods us to ask ourselves the kind of questions very few movies do.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

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