Les Innocentes (The Innocents)

Luxembourg director Anne Fontaine has finally made a great film. Even if she has been one of the most prolific female directors (Les Innocentes is her 14th film in the Director chair), all of her previous efforts have lacked something, either in the screenplay, the intonation, or the approach, to make them truly special, but we need to acknowledge that she has infused (most of) her films with a special vision that deals with female desire and ambition with originality and authenticity.

But in this new film, she step up her game, as if she had acknowledged what was she doing great and decided to pay special attention to her opportunity areas. She tackles a major event (something that could have been almost a greek tragedy), but keep it always subtle and elegant, avoiding almost every temptation to fall in sentimentalism (she succumbs to unnecessary love story, though), and creates an aesthetic style that helps to create the mood and the tone of the entire film.

If we have seen a lot of this dramas that try to show the horrors of blind faith (Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills, and Pablo Larraín's The Club as outstanding contemporary examples), it's that she creates a plausible and human explanation to the atrocities that happen between the walls of this convent, so it's the suffering and the vexations the ones that led to a twisted understanding of good-making. Even if it's a story that will creep you out, Fontaine is able to create round characters to make statements in two levels: moral and political. Because this tale of nuns that became pregnant after they were raped by soldiers is telling how much suffering is caused to women that are oppressed not only by patriarchy, but also by their own beliefs and is smart enough to let us question ourselves before to point our fingers at who is to blame for all this atrocities.