By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs: In Darkness
Holland and her crew, especially cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, make this experience so gritt. it almost hurts to watch it. The sewers of In Darkness are not like the sinister, shadowy and strangely romantic Viennese sewer underworld of Carol Reed and Graham Greene‘s great 1949 film noir The Third Man — those vast echoing tunnels through which Orson Welles ran from Joseph Cotten like a rat in a maze. Nor are they stark and grim and deadly, like the Warsaw sewers where the anti-Nazi Polish WW2 partisans hid in Andrzej Wajda’s 1956 Polish masterpiece Kanal.
The sewers of Lvov are smaller and inky black. They’re steeped in an airless-looking gloom, cramped and comfortless, wet with sewage and slime. These sewers look like real sewers. (Actually, they’re a mix of genuine locations and sets by Erwin Prib and the art directors.) They are true hell-holes, and the people hiding there are a mismatched crowd of businessmen, operators, snobs, adulterers, ordinary people, families and even children, all escaping from the Lvov ghetto, crowded together on the walkways and pressed to the breaking point.
The leader of the group is Mundek Margulies (Benno Furmann) — and Mundek knows the money must inevitably run out. The Chiger family — father Ignacy (Herbert Knaup), mother Paulina (Maria Schrader), daughter Krystyna (Milla Bankowicz) and son Pawel (Oliwier Stanczak) — are a tight-night group, being pulled apart by the awful conditions of life below. All of them, good people and somewhat bad ones, are living through a time of horror that makes the initial ordeal of Anne Frank’s family — hiding in their Amsterdam attic — look almost comfortable.
The Jewish group, or “Socha’s Jews,” as he eventually calls them, have entered this hell out of desperation. All around them, before their voluntary imprisonment begins, other Lvov ghetto Jews are being arrested and taken to the death camps, or simply shot on the streets or killed in the outside forests without trial. This is undoubtedly what will happen to all of them, unless they can hide from their murderers.
The Jews’ “savior,” Socha, isn’t acting out of the goodness of his heart, at first. He does it for the money. When the story begins, “Poldek” even shows signs of anti-Semitism, something typical for many Catholic Poles in that era. But, as the months go on, as Socha has to feed and watch over the fugitives, to reassure them , and to provide their only link to the outside world of daylight and fresh air — as he has to resort to ever more dangerous ruses to keep them all hidden and alive — we see him change. Socha is a crook, but he‘s also a fearsomely competent worker and man, someone who can accomplish what most of the others can’t. That very competence and self-assurance eventually helps humanize him, while, by contrast, the Nazi “efficiency” turns them into monsters. Eventually they run out of money, and Socha must make a decision: to abandon them or to go on hiding and helping them. What he chooses to do, and why he chooses to do it, and what eventually happens, make for an astonishing climax to an extraordinary story.
In Darkness, a film of great emotional power, one of the best Holland has ever done. It’s been a critical hit so far, and deserves to be, though some critics and pundits have complained (in generally sympathetic notices) that the movie suffers from “Holocaust movie clichés,” that it’s giving us what we’ve heard before.
There’s a bit of snobbishness, well-meaning of course, in attitudes like that. What these pundits are really saying is that In Darkness, and maybe even Schindler’s List and The Pianist and others as well, are something they expected, something they’ve seen before, that they’re the kind of film that the art house audience has seen more than once — and that since it’s also the kind of film that’s often up for awards (because of its theme and subject matter), maybe it’s not really all tha exceptional, not as good maybe, as this year’s foreign language Oscar winner (In Darkness was one of the five nominees), Asghar Farhadi‘s fine, humane Iranian family drama, A Separation.
But a lot of the people who go to movies, especially younger people, not only don’t know the facts of the Holocaust. They sometimes don’t even know who their U.S. Senator is, or what countries fought each other in World War II, or why they fought. Many of them don’t read that much and if it wasn’t for the Internet, which supplies them with a fake memory, they might be lost. If they do know the broad facts, they don’t know the subtleties or the nuances — and they certainly haven’t had a film experience of the kind In Darkness gives them, or for that matter, The Third Man or Kanal or A Separation. Those are film buff films, and it’s a shame they sometimes aren’t seen by too many more than film buffs.
Socha‘s story in fact provides something relatively rare in current dramatic movies: a true and convincing depiction of moral growth under the most extreme and terrifying conditions — centering on a character, Socha, who initially seems far from heroic, even if he’s gutsier and sharper than the Nazis he keeps outwitting.
Playing this meaty, complex role, Wieckiewicz triumphs. He gives us a human being so real and earthy and so full of seeming contradictions, full of darkness and light, of sometime badness and goodness, that he transfixes us. This is the kind of acting the young Brando gave us, or Spencer Tracy, or Raimu or Depardieu or Liv Ullmann or Bogart or Jack Nicholson: acting without seeming artifice, so the words strike straight to the heart.
The rest of the cast are all fine too, especially Furmann as Mundek and Michal Zurawski as Socha‘s Nazi buddy Bortnik. But it’s Wieckiewicz’s movie and he wins us easily. This picture is an extraordinary work. You feel it in your heart and soul and senses. And the movie demonstrates something we sometimes forget: Agnieszka Holland, whose themes often involve moral struggle, can be one of the world’s geatest filmmakers.
Two of Holland‘s most highly praised movies as writer-director — her Oscar nominees Angry Harvest (1985) and Europa, Europa (1991) — were also World War II era movies, and in them, as well as here, she’s able to create an experience both intensely realistic and almost mythic in its force. In “Darkness,” she‘s working with another writer‘s script — David F. Shamoon‘s dramatization of the events described in Robert Marshall‘s book “In the Sewers of Lvov” and in the 2008 memoir “The Girl in the Green Sweater,“ which was written by Kristyna, the little girl of the Chiger family who survived the experience (and who saw and appreciated this movie at Toronto). But Holland had big input into the script — including the crucial choice of filming in all the various languages of the old Lvov: Polish, German, Yiddish and Ukrainian instead of that ultimate movie universalizer, English.
This is a great movie on an essential subject, which it fully honors — and it has a great performance by Robert Wieckiewicz as Socha. A “Righteous Gentile” Poldek was called. (There were 6,000 other Righteous Gentiles in Poland, whose World War II record on prejudice was otherwise sometimes stained.) And righteous he was. Equal to Schindler‘s List and The Pianist is sheer dramatic power, a bit superior to them in verisimilitude, In Darkness is a movie that should be seen by more than just the art house audience — a film that plunges us into darkness, then pulls us up to the light. I hope Holland gets all the praise she deserves, and that her collaborators, like Wieckiewicz and Shamoon and Dylewska, are honored as well. And Poldek, may he rest in peace and the sleep of the just. (In Polish, Russian and Yiddish, with subtitles.)