The Innocents

Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents packs such an emotional wallop that you don’t realize how many philosophical concerns can be unpacked in it.

French 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 — leavened by drinks, dance and sex —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 initially 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.

The soldiers have given the Mother Superior not a baby but syphilis. That is, she is poisoned physically as well as in her callous treatment of the innocent babies. Yet she is not exactly evil. She serves what she perceives to be a higher cause. 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 the 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. She is not so much evil as serving the wrong order, the institution not humanity. 

One nun so firmly denies her pregnancy that her body shows no signs of it and she later refuses even to acknowledge the actual birth. In the others, though, the birth stirs maternal emotions more natural and affecting than the cold rule of Mother Superior. In responding to their babies the nuns rise from their spiritual arenas to embrace the reality and the needs of real humanity. 

Mathilde solves the convent’s problem by rejecting theMother Superior’s imposition of secrecy, the convent’s original mission to close itself off from the world — as the heavy gate scenes impose—in favour of letting in the world and helping the needy. Mathilde suggests the convent take in the gaggle of street orphans and care for them. Then they can raise their babies among them. They will hide their secret in proper public works instead of in shame. Thus Mathilde serves both the spiritual and the secular orders by valuing humanity over old dictates.  

Before Mathilde intervenes the nuns are quite helpless, with only their prayers for help. Having sent away the first nun, Mathilde relents when she sees her later, kneeling in the snow, praying to no obvious avail. Unless, of course, we read Mathilde’s dedication as sent by God. It may well be, because Mathilde — having been raised by working class French Communists — adheres to no party or camp but is dedicated to human service. Whether or not there is a God such dedicated people are a godsend. So the religious person more properly serves humanity than any institution. In serving the nuns, Mathilde has to risk the same charges of disobedience and laxity from her superiors as the nuns do from theirs.  

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 briefly finds security in the convent. 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 the contemplative exclude themselves. Here that’s the superior motherhood.

Of course that reality will continue to intrude. The film stops in 1945. Ahead for the Poles lie 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, which admittedly had never been strong. She abandons both callings, mother and nun, to find a new life in the world.   

There’s a telling inflection in Mathilde’s rapist’s language. Despite her screams and resistance, he asserts “She really wants it.” When the other men bound out of their truck to join in he says “I think she really wants us all.” The line expresses both the man’s physical power over her and his arrogant assumption of her compliance, her desire — in the face of all evidence. When her doctor and her officer boss criticize her lateness and fatigue — unaware of her extra service to the convent — they provide a more civilized version of the rapist’s superiority, authority and disregard for the feminine. 
     But once they know, they respond with a proper respect — the officer invites her to dance. The Mother Superior hides in shame rather than admit mistake or apologize.