"In Darkness"- Impressions after the movie by Gosia Fus

"In Darkness" - impressions after the movie.

The film is definitely difficult, after leaving the theater I was tired and overwhelmed. It is certainly different than all the movies about the Holocaust I have ever seen.
First, you actually cannot see the main perpetrators - the Germans. We see Socha and the Jews that he saves, there are Ukrainians, but the Germans - there are hardly any of them.
Picture of the Jews is also different than in other movies of that type. We do not have here a classical picture of the suffering victim, "white" and flawless. Jews are shown as real humans with their human weaknesses. We have a father, a husband who betrays his wife in front of her eyes and the eyes of his daughter, a man who can expose his family to the mortal danger in order to save his lover. We have a man who must choose whom to save, who must decide who will prove to be "most needed". We have finally traitors who rob and flee their companions in order to save themselves. In the film, no one is perfect which is its great merit.



Sorce :http://www.wkinach.eu/film,w-ciemnosci.html


The film also surprises with the amount of sex scenes. One wonders whether this amount is actually needed. I am afraid that most people after leaving the cinema will remember mainly the sex scenes. I understand the director's intention, which was probably the attempt to show that nothing can destroy the will of live and sex as the most primitive act of life shows it very bluntly. We wonder how it was even possible that in the ghetto people could have sex, as well as in the sewers, that people could do it among all the filth and stench. Yet even in such conditions people lived and loved. These parts of the movie, however, are the reason why it will not be probably shown to high school students and youth around the world as for example "Schindler's List" is. These bold scenes are in my opinion the advantages of the film as they are an attempt to show how the truth could look like, how life in such terrible conditions may look like but at the same time they are also film weaknesses.
I also think that the movie should have some historical introduction. While viewers in Poland, but also not all of them, know the context, they know what prewar Lvov was and what was happening there during the war, I believe that at the beginning of the movie few words of introduction should appear. Viewers unfamiliar with the context may be wondering what year this is, what is this place, what Poles are doing there, why Ukrainians are saying that “Hitler is the best what could happened to them”, whether the history shown in the movie is unique or many people were saved in a similar way, etc. I think that such information is necessary to understand the movie and the story it tells.
I did not like the last sentence of the film at all. After we learn that in 1945 Socha was killed saving his daughter and the fact that at his funeral, someone said that it was "divine punishment for saving the Jews" appears the text: "as if we need God to punish ourselves," which seems to me far too moralistic and not necessary. I think the movie could end up without adding this last sentence.
I loved the light in the film. Shining eyes of Jews in hiding are actually all that we can see in the sewers. I remember very well the scene when the choice was being made who Socha will help and how faces of those who are left behind are fading and passing into darkness – it was very theatrical and symbolic.
The end of the movie disappointed me a little, the scene shoving how the Jews are leaving sewers happened so rapidly and it seems to me that it could have been more celebrated.

Generally I think the movie is very good especially because it tries to show the history in a more real, if possible, manner. I'm not sure, however, whether this is a film for an Oscar.


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