In Darkness, a story about Jews trapped in a sewer for more than a year during the war, is engaging but mostly offers more of the same.
Poland
3.5*
Director:
Agnieszka Holland
Screenwriter:
David F. Shamoon
Director of Photography:
Jolanta Dylewska
Running time: 145 minutes
Original title: W ciemności
Films about the Holocaust are important because they remind us what tragedy is possible when people turn against each other in struggles of religion, power and race. Having firmly established the misery and the hardship of the events that took place, though, many filmmakers are unfortunately tempted by the subject matter to tell stories that are not very distinct from the ones that came before.
Schindler’s List is by far the best-known film about oppression during World War II, but the story about an ethnic German who saved hundreds of Jews by employing them in his factories in Moravia and not letting them be deported to the concentration camps was criticized by Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-hour documentary, Shoah, is filled with interviews of those who suffered through the events of the time.
A major criticism is that such stories of salvation can blind the viewer to the ensemble of despair that hung over the Jewish population across Europe at the time. However, while this is an important point to make, that does not mean the films themselves only have to be doom and gloom from beginning to end.
Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella) was very successful in its presentation of a father who, to keep his son entertained and not expose him to the horrors of war, pretended the concentration camp was a theatre and they were all only playing parts.
On the other hand, the extraordinary Hungarian film Fateless (Sorstalanság) had as its central character a teenage boy on the verge of adulthood who doesn’t understand everything that is happening to him, his friends and his family, but for whom the experience of being sent to Buchenwald and spending his time with other prisoners was not at all terrible, despite his near-death, because the enduring support of everyone in the camp was so strong.
The Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland doesn’t bring much new to the screen with In Darkness, her telling of the real-life story of a group of Jews in Lwów in eastern Poland (what is today Lviv in Ukraine) who were saved by a sewer worker called Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz) who kept them underground, away from harm, for 14 months during the war.
Holland has churned out impressive films in the past, most notable among them 1990’s Europa Europa, which focused on Nazi-occupied Poland, sometimes with evident irony, and the ordeal of a fair-haired Jewish boy who pretends he is German (or Aryan) in order to survive. She was also behind the formidable 2012 miniseries Burning Bush (Hořící keř), which examined how slowly the wheels of history turned after the 1969 self-immolation of the Czechoslovak Jan Palach in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Prague a few months earlier.
In Darkness’s presentation of a man who starts off demanding money from those he hides deep down in the sewer system, but eventually grows fond of the people and sees it as his duty to protect them from the authorities — some of whom are very good acquaintances from before the war — really doesn’t offer a fresh perspective or a new twist on Oskar Schindler’s story.
Socha is patrolling the sewers with a friend when they find a group of Jews escaping their ghetto shortly before it is razed to the ground. He accepts their bribe and helps them to a safe area inside the vast system of underground tunnels filled with rats and the smell of putrefaction.
The central premise is strong, as viewers will almost certainly ask themselves whether they would do the same thing in such a situation, but the story of people who betray their Jewish neighbours for the sake of a handout — in this film a mere 500 złoty — has been told many times before in as many countries as have made Holocaust films.
Though the viewer can easily respect this man, it remains a bit of a mystery why (despite his objections that the Jews only whine about their circumstances and do not appreciate all that he is doing to protect them) he risks his life to save them.
What Holland and screenwriter David F. Shamoon do succeed in conveying is not the grand spectacle of life under oppression, but the human dimension of people being stuck together in a small space with little food and fresh water and with no certainty about their future. In Darkness contains some beautiful moments of realization on the part of a character who understands that there can be unexpected goodness in another person, and it is these rare glimpses of unadulterated humanity that make the film engaging. There are also a number of scenes that make it clear what the characters feel and how frustrated they are by living in such close quarters with people they either despise or lust after.
This is a film that would have had more power if it had not been so similar to so many others. Shoah’s Lanzmann decried Holocaust stories that had a happy ending, and even though we see dead bodies in this film, it was made to examine the characters themselves rather than the situation above ground. In Darkness is technically accomplished, and it does have moments of real human emotion effectively communicated, but mostly it doesn’t offer any kind of fresh perspective on Jewish hardship under the Nazis, and that means that ultimately the film lacks real punch.