Anne Fontaine has directed a robust film inspired by a true story from the second world war: a tragic drama that veteran screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer has adapted from the eyewitness account of French nurse Madeleine Pauliac, who served with the French Red Cross in Poland in 1945. It has force, but less complexity and subtlety than I hoped, and is perhaps too obviously in search of palliative redemption.
Caesar-nominated French star Lou de Laâge plays Mathilde Beaulieu, a Red Cross medical assistant who chances across an extraordinary situation: in a Polish convent, most of the nuns have become pregnant through being raped by the brutal Soviet soldiers who are stationed nearby. The sisters refuse official help but the Mother in charge reluctantly accepts Mathilde’s offer to nurse the women secretly through their pregnancy. They are in horror-struck denial, unable to relinquish the belief that it must somehow be their fault. One stricken soul clings fast to the delusion that her attacker gallantly defended her against worse assault, and that he is now her “fiance”. As for Mathilde’s colleagues, they have no great regard for the Polish Catholic church. Guilt and shame hang heavy thereabouts, like the fallen snow. But there is no real examination of psychological or historical minutiae in this film, and there is an apparent need for a happy, even sucrose, ending. It pales in comparison with, say, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida. Yet it is fervently and strongly performed.
