Title: In Darkness

Opens: December 9, 2011

Human life in sewers has been in the news. Not so long ago, Saddam Hussein was found in a make-shift ditch with a growth of beard that he kept up through his trial and execution. In October of this year, Libyan dictator Muamar Gadhafi was flushed out of a drainpipe and summarily executed. But not all inhabitants of sewers are rats like them. Agnieszka Holland, a Warsaw-born, Prague-educated director best known in these parts for “Europa Europa” (a Jewish boy in Germany joins the Hitler Youth to conceal his religious identity), takes up a true story, names unchanged, with “In Darkness.” The title that has allegorical meaning to define a tragic period in Polish history, given a more specific, literal meaning in that the film takes place largely underground, within a sewer in the Polish city of Lvov. This time the sewer residents are mostly good guys, victims who in real life remain hidden from the Nazi occupiers and their Ukrainian and Polish comrades-in-arms. The tale, which was delineated by Robert Marshall’s book “In the Sewers of Lvlv” available on the Amazon website for a small fortune, is a harrowing one, a film whose editor, Michal Czarnecki, explains that he would like us in the movie audience to feel that we are underground with the victims as well.

The underground setting is actually a reconstruction in Berlin’s Babelsberg studio, Jolanta Dylewskia using a Red camera to provide some light. “In Darkness” takes us to the early 1940s, in the part of Western Poland occupied by Germany. Jews were rounded up from the ghetto and taken, if they are not first shot for sport by Nazi soldiers, to a concentration camp where few would survive. Ukranian and Polish militias are organized, told to take revenge on Jews and Bolsheviks. To avoid that fate, a dozen Jews are given sanctuary by a town sewer inspector, Leopold Socha (Robert Wieçkiewicz), risking the lives of himself, his wife and his daughter as the Jews offer him more money than the Germans would proffer for ratting them out.

As the action transpires, the victims, who are to live together for fourteen months, find reasons for hostility to one another as would anyone forced to survive under the most primitive conditions. One intellectual fellow prefers to speak German, “the language of Heinrich Heine…you ought to learn it,” another cheats on his wife, who watches one of several sexual acts taking place in the dark. One woman refuses to continue living like a rodent, fleeing the safety for the parlous life around the ghetto.

Despite risking his life to protect “his” Jews, Socha is no angel, seen near the opening of the story with a con-man associate raiding the home of some rich Jews for money and jewelry and anything he can sell. Though his wife, Wanda (Kinga Preis), states that Jews are “like us,” she back away when told that Socha had come upon a group of Jews in hiding and offered to safeguard their lives, bringing them sausages and bread bought with some of the 500 zlotys that he is to receive daily.

Despite the claustrophobia and lack of light that could make regular moviegoers think of Samuel Maoz’s 2009 film “Lebanon” which takes place almost wholly inside an Israeli tank, we can make some distinctions within the crew. The Chigers (Herbert Knaup, Maria Schrader) are a wealthy couple. Klara Keller (Agniewszka Grochowska) is concerned about her sister, who bolts from the sewers to take her chances above. A baby is born: what to do with the screaming toddler? Sex scenes are deliberately designed to make the audience feel uncomfortable: how can people make out given the body odors, the dangers, the lack of privacy?

This film could be called “The Greening of Socha,” as the principal theme is the conversion of a money-grubber who opportunistically takes care of the Jews for money into a mini-Schindler, who identifies with their plight, developing such empathy with them that when the Jews run out of payments, he heroically continues as their protector. A scene toward the conclusion takes us out of the dark into the bright Lvov sunlight. The Russians have liberated the city. As the victims ascend into civilization, blinded by the sun, one of the younger victims wants to go back into the sewer-a situation that will remind students of Phil. 101 of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

This is a wrenching work, one which demonstrates the humanity within an ordinary Pole-a sewer worker to boot—who rises above his ethical station by his identification with “his” Jews. The epilogue tells us that Socha was killed accidentally saving his daughter from a runaway Russian truck, securing the comment from some of his neighbors that “God took revenge on the man who helped the Jews.” Given the pogroms that followed the liberation, resulting in the murders of several Jews by Poles-who we learn had been told by their priest that not only the Jews involved in the crucifixion of Jesus are guilty but all their children throughout the generation—we don’t doubt that Poland, whose population had been one-tenth Jewish-is no almost without any.

Casting is impeccable all-around. Director Holland states in the production notes that she wanted to the movie to be its lengthy two hours and twenty-five minutes to give the audience the feeling that they are in the sewer. Her ambition is seemingly met when she notes that people in the audience breathed a sigh of relief when the prisoners began exiting. This is Poland’s entry into the Oscar competition for films released in 2011, sporting dialogue in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian and one dialect of Polish spoken in Lvov. It played at festivals this year at Telluride and Toronto.

145 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall – B+