AGNIESZKA HOLLAND: GREEN BORDER (2023 - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL)


STILL FROM GREEN BORDER

Refugees treated as pawns by brutal authoritarian leaders across the Polish-Belarus borders

Agnieszka Holland's harrowing new film is a closeup of a piece of the world refugee crisis from multiple viewpoints. Helped by two other directors, Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha, she crafts a docudrama focused primarily on a Syrian family, father, mother, grandfather, kids, young sister, and a single bespectacled Afghan woman who speaks English, not Arabic. We meet them on a Turkish plane and the Arabic speakers naively think they can go through Poland to Sweden, where the family have a relative living. The Afghan lady wants instead to be given refuge in Poland. Instead they become pawns in a brutal game.

When they get to Belarus, and take a taxi prepaid from Sweden to Poland, they wind up first extorted, then tossed back and forth across a barbed wire line camping precariously in the woods - the "green border." The two ultimate villains behind their cruel treatment are Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the dictatorial leader of Belarus, and the no more admirable Polish leader Andrzej Duda. The brutality with which they are treated by the guards on both sides, the suffering of the young children and older man, are difficult to watch. In an omnibus review from Toronto, Brian Tallerico calls this film "a movie that many people probably couldn’t get through, but they probably should."

Holland and her cowriters Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz have more up their sleaves, and they shift their focus for a while, after the mistreatment of the refugees has become impossible to watch any more, to others in the equation. There is the young Polish guard, Jan (Tomasz Wlosok)and his pregnant wife (Malwina Buss). The parallelism is a little too obvious since there are several pregnant women among the refugees subsequently shown, one of whom, an African woman, gets particularly brutal treatment. We see the young Polish guard with his wife. Then Jan is present for a pep talk from an officer who says the refugees are being used as weapons by Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin; he encourages the guards to treat them as objects and regard them as scum. But Jan starts to drink heavily and suffers psychological torments from this job, though he refuses to quit, thinking thework a national duty.

Another of the fragmentary "chapters" takes us to "activists," who seek to help the refugees in the "green border" forest interzone without breaking laws. But we also follow a woman shrink Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a recent widow whose two dogs are her main emotional contacts. She joins with the activists, but her conditioned empathy, and perhaps a sense of privilege and the lack of immediate family she needs to protect, lead her to break the rules and take outsized risks, causing her own temporary arrest and making her too visible to provide haven for refugees in her ample hous.

There is a memorable sequence where some young French-speaking African boys are taken into a posh Polish house and sing rap with a Polish kid. Showering and dressing beforehand, they realize they "smelled bad," but, once cleaned up, they have enough juice left to enjoy themselves and bond. However in another brutal episode, some of the original group get mired in a swamp and children die - a sequence as painful to witness as the brutal beatings earlier.

It sometimes feels that this intense, well-staged, well-photographed film has attention deficit disorder. Boyd van Hoeij, writing from Venice for The Verdict, is not happy with the film's structure. He considers Green Border to be "hindered by" both "extremely predictable character development" and "a mosaic-like approach to narrative" that impairs our ability to "really get to know" or "emphasize with" any of the characters.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Three Colors" trilogy shifts around somewhat this way to compelling effect: it's just hard to do and requires a certain panache. Another multiple plot composition that succeeds impressively is that of the 1989 British miniseries "Traffik," where action switches back and forth between Afghan and Pakistani growers, dealers and manufacturers, German dealers, and British users. "Traffik" does this with a sense of drama, of art, and of entertainment. The writing of Green Border isn't on that level; isn't equal to its authenticity of mise-en-scène and casting, its awareness of current politics, and its moral sense. We feel deeply for the suffering of these abused and toyed with human beings, and we wish Green Border were as well made as it is urgent.

Recent Holland films I have reviewed are Burning Bush, Spoor, Mr. Jones, and Charlatan. An earlier favorite is the one about Rimbaud, Total Eclipse, for its go-for-broke performance by the young Leonardo DiCaprio; and, of course Europa Europa. Recently she has done a lot of television, including several episodes of "The Wire." Green Border is a TV series hastily assembled into a feature film.

Green Border/Zielona granica, 147mins., debuted at Venice (where it received the Special Jury Prize), also featured at Toronto, AFI, New York (where it was screened for this review Oct. 4, 2023) and Chicago. NYFF screenings Oct. 4 and 5, Q&A's with Agnieszka Holland. Metacritic rating: 8̶5̶%̶ 83%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.