Polish Compassion | J. Hoberman

Europe, in Agnieszka Holland’s rough-and-tumble Inexperienced Border, is a beacon of hope and a cauldron of hate. The twin perspective is implicit within the film’s title, which refers each to the European Union’s “open” inner borders and people forested worldwide boundaries related to smuggled contraband and unlawful crossings.

Holland’s movie dramatizes an incident precipitated within the autumn of 2021 by Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. After luring a number of thousand asylum seekers—principally Syrian, Kurdish, and Afghan—there with the promise of free transit to the EU, Lukashenko dumped them on his nation’s borders with Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Poland, then led by the right-wing, nationalist Regulation and Justice occasion (PiS), responded by making a militarized safety zone between the barbed-wire borders and barring help staff and docs from serving to the stranded refugees. The so-called vacationers had been compelled forwards and backwards alongside the 250-mile frontier. The state of affairs continues right this moment—half of a bigger, fifteen-year-long humanitarian catastrophe exemplified by the greater than two million Center Jap and African refugees who’ve crossed or tried to cross the Mediterranean.

Holland, who was born in and at one level exiled from Poland, treats the disaster as an ethical disaster. Primarily Inexperienced Border is a flashback to World Warfare II, a topic that Holland, now seventy-five, has explored in a number of movies in regards to the destiny of East European Jews over the course of a exceptional profession that features work in France, Germany, and Hollywood. She is an indomitable politically minded filmmaker, and certain the primary girl to stage and shoot battlefield fight. (Lina Wertmüller integrated World Warfare II newsreel footage into her 1975 characteristic Seven Beauties; Holland’s Europa, Europa, from 1990, predates Kathryn Bigelow’s The Harm Locker by practically 20 years.) Her résumé contains three episodes of The Wire; her 1997 adaptation of Washington Sq. remodeled Henry James’s genteel antiromance into an emotional slugfest; and her anarcho-feminist Spoor (2017) is a sturdy protection of ecoterrorism. Writing on that film—tailored from Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Useless, a 2009 novel by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk—in Movie Remark, Amy Taubin referred to as it “the most resonant and inspiring political film of the century.”   

Equally devoid of nuance, its ethical reckoning accentuated by good black-and-white cinematography, Inexperienced Border is a visceral ordeal and virtuoso tumult. The gratuitously merciless Polish and Belarusian border guards, the starved refugees huddled in barbed-wire encampments or frozen within the forest, the savage roundups, indiscriminate beatings, and snarling canine—to not point out the official euphemisms, racial slurs, and self-righteous indifference to human struggling—evoke a Holocaust through which the victims aren’t Jews. To one of many movie’s Polish commanders, they’re “human bullets” in a hybrid battle—terrorists, pedophiles, and disaster actors despatched by Putin “to play on our Polish compassion.”

Naturally the aged, the underage, and the pregnant are available in for probably the most abuse. Neither is the viewers spared. “We’re in Poland! We’re in Europe! We made it!” cries a middle-aged, bespectacled Afghan girl who has managed to crawl below the fence. As nearsighted as she is, we all know she’s going to by no means make it.

Holland’s movies—the topic of a current retrospective on the Museum of the Shifting Picture in New York—bear the total weight of twentieth-century European historical past. Each set within the Nineteen Thirties, her two earlier options, Mr. Jones (2019) and Charlatan (2021), concern, respectively, the Stalin-made Ukrainian famine and a charismatic Czech religion healer employed by Nazi and Communist leaders alike; her present mission is dedicated to Franz Kafka. She was born in postwar Poland, the kid of two resistance fighters, her mom a Righteous Gentile (as designated by Yad Vashem), her father a Jewish dissident Communist who died in police custody when she was 13. In Prague, the place she attended movie college, she was arrested for protesting the 1968 Soviet invasion.

Coming into the Polish movie business with some problem, Holland was mentored by the good Andrzej Wajda, who credited her with inspiring his initially suppressed anti-Stalinist masterpiece Man of Marble (1977). With Wajda she wrote Tough Therapy (1978), based mostly partially on her father’s destiny, and cowrote Danton (1983), a film about Poland that (as a rondo of betrayals, putsches, present trials, and judicial homicide) many French viewers, together with the socialist authorities that helped fund it, took as a slander on their revolution.

On her personal Holland directed three quintessential works of East Bloc essential cinema, arguably probably the most spectacular beginning run of any “socialist” filmmaker since Wajda made A Era, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds within the mid-Nineteen Fifties. Provincial Actors (1979) used a time-tested East European metaphor within the service of a tragic and delicate comedy of careerism behind the Curtain. Fever (1981), set in 1905, employed a basic allegorical swap, pitting politically right Polish revolutionaries in opposition to reactionary Russian monarchists. Each films had their issues with native censors. Nevertheless it was her early masterpiece, the supremely miserabilist A Lonely Lady (1981), a grueling darkish comedy of social dysfunction, that crossed the road by attacking just about each establishment in communist Poland.

“Invited” by the state to go away Poland after the declaration of martial regulation in December 1981, Holland launched herself within the West with two highly effective worldwide successes, Offended Harvest (1985) and Europa, Europa—each produced by one other powerful cookie, the Polish-born, German-based Holocaust survivor Artur Brauner. The primary was a World Warfare II kammerspiel based mostly on a novel coauthored in jail by Hermann Area and Stanislaw Mierzenski, who had been jailed as spies by the Polish authorities within the paranoid early Nineteen Fifties. It activates the connection between a Jewish girl and the Polish farmer who shelters her. Europa, Europa, based mostly on the true story of a Jewish boy who handed for Aryan and even joined the Hitler Youth, was so hated by the German movie business that somewhat than submit it for Oscar consideration they submitted nothing. Holland’s third Holocaust movie, In Darkness (2011), an emotionally exhausting account of Polish Jews hiding from the Nazis within the sewers of Łódź, likewise targeted on the dialectic between sufferer and rescuer.

So it’s with Inexperienced Border. Whereas the Belarusians are vicious sadists, the Poles are divided between official, usually drunken persecutors and near-saintly, dissident saviors. Certainly, the movie is exceptional for its evocation of selfless solidarity. It is usually characteristically blunt, incorporating a notable dig on the PiS. Its constructive heroine, Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a bourgeois psychoanalyst who turns into a risk-taking activist, holds distant classes with a Warsaw man who rails in opposition to Poland’s “fascist” authorities.

Regardless of residual traces of socialist realist aesthetic dogma (most pronounced in Burning Bush, her 2013 HBO miniseries on the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia), Holland has scant endurance for the pieties of any organized faith. To Kill a Priest (1988), one of many first movies she made after her expulsion from Poland, dramatized the political homicide of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, an outspoken supporter of Solidarity, however Shot within the Coronary heart (2001), a curious HBO movie on the execution of Gary Gilmore, is much less a press release opposing capital punishment than a free-floating critique of spiritual authoritarianism. A self-righteous, hypocritical Catholic priest is among the many worst of the dangerous actors within the remarkably pantheist, if not pagan Spoor. Inexperienced Border begins with a bleak joke on non secular religion—one member of a Syrian household, bumping by the clouds on a Belarusian jet, describes their Lukashenko-sanctioned path to EU sanctuary as “a gift from God.” In the identical spirit (and in what may nearly be a Woody Allen gag), an outdated man’s pious salah, provided in the course of the Polish woods, precipitates a bone-drenching downpour. A lot for divine intervention. Holland is much more caustic in her references to the hypocrisies of Catholic Poles, most explicitly when Julia—detained, strip-searched, and abused by Polish particular forces for aiding the refugees—taunts the police by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

In 2017 Holland instructed reporters on the Berlin Movie Competition that Spoor, whose protagonist appears to embody outdated Europe’s mythic matriarchal prehistory, had been attacked as “anti-Christian” and browse as overtly political: the PiS has constantly gone after ladies’s rights and condemned the EU’s comparatively “green” place on ecology. Inexperienced Border provoked a extra strident outcry. Launched in Poland final fall after profitable a particular jury prize on the 2023 Venice Movie Competition, weeks earlier than a nationwide election, the film turned a difficulty in a marketing campaign already largely involved with demonizing refugees. It was attacked unseen by PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who referred to as Holland a Stalinist and in contrast her to Joseph Goebbels. (She filed a defamation go well with.) The federal government launched a marketing campaign advert that, amongst different issues, deployed the spouse of a border guard to characterize Holland’s movie as “international propaganda” geared toward “destroying our lives.”

Inexperienced Border and Spoor are companion items—alike not solely of their politics however of their evocation of camaraderie and their ambiguously hopeful endings. (The texture-good conclusion of Spoor exaggerates that of Tokarczuk’s marvelous novel.) If Inexperienced Border’s best offense was its depiction of Poland’s safety power, its epilogue, by celebrating Polish generosity, brings down the hammer even more durable. Dated February 26, 2022, two days after Putin invaded Ukraine, the film exhibits the Poles—together with some beforehand seen of their capability as border guards—courteously welcoming the vanguard of the 2 million Ukrainian refugees.