Green Bor­der – first-look review

A cur­so­ry scan of this fall’s film fes­ti­val line­ups would sug­gest that the ongo­ing immi­gra­tion cri­sis has, right­ly, claimed a con­trol­ling share in Euro­pean outrage.

In Ladj Ly’s Les Indésir­ables, French hous­ing author­i­ties fun­nel refugees into high-rise slums until they can be demol­ished entire­ly; in Mat­teo Garrone’s Io Cap­i­tano, asy­lum-seek­ers make the per­ilous odyssey from Africa to Sici­ly, a jour­ney that the Ital­ian gov­ern­ment all but open­ly hopes they won’t sur­vive; and in Agniesz­ka Holland’s bruis­ing, ulti­mate­ly gal­va­niz­ing Green Bor­der, those flee­ing war in Syr­ia find them­selves trapped in a Kafkaesque cycle of state-sanc­tioned vio­lence as they’re jet­ti­soned back and forth across the Pol­ish-Belaru­sian divide. (Mean­while in Amer­i­ca, res­i­dents of the city with the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty scream at new­com­ers that they’re not wel­come, while con­gress­men proud­ly show off the cir­cu­lar blades they’ve installed in the bar­ri­ers float­ing on the Rio Grande. Satan ought to break ground on a new wing for an increas­ing­ly over­crowd­ed hell.)

With unflinch­ing stark­ness, Hol­land traces a path along a new trail of tears fraught with dan­ger for those forced to trav­el it, from nat­ur­al haz­ards like quick­sand and hypother­mia to the omnipresent threat of the bor­der patrol agents. In a racism-charged train­ing ses­sion, they’re instruct­ed not to kill any­one, but to swift­ly dis­pose of any bod­ies in the event of a mishap. Most of the brutes receive this as if learn­ing about an inci­den­tal perk of the job.

One of the recruits (Tomasz Włosok) doesn’t look so jazzed about the prospect of human rights vio­la­tions, the first seedling of doubt in his work that will sprout with time into a change of heart — but not com­plete­ly, and not in any way that puts him in dan­ger. As Hol­land expands her aper­ture to cov­er this pen­i­tent Gestapo as well as a psy­chother­a­pist (Maja Ostaszews­ka) turned rad­i­cal activist putting her pro­gres­sive mon­ey where her mouth is, the ques­tion of what’s to be done with all this guilt rais­es and refus­es to answer itself. (And though the arche­type of the con­vert­ed cop rings false, his arc illus­trates the film’s implied mis­sion to tear off the blind­ers by putting inhu­man­i­ties in frank view.)

Hol­land has talked about choos­ing to shoot in black-and-white in order to evoke World War II reels, and the specter of the Holo­caust casts a long shad­ow over a coun­try now reit­er­at­ing the geno­cide it faced less than a cen­tu­ry ago. Hol­land forces the mat­ter of pub­lic respon­si­bil­i­ty through one craven minor char­ac­ter who’d rather pre­serve her­self than bend the law to help those in need, a stand-in for the non-Jew­ish Poles clos­ing their doors in an extra­or­di­nary cri­sis, which, like the one now at hand, demand­ed ordi­nary cit­i­zens assume some per­son­al risk for the greater good.

The first sec­tion wields the great­est and most ter­ri­ble emo­tion­al pow­er, how­ev­er, as we fol­low a small band of immi­grants through a gaunt­let of abuse and mis­for­tune which they have no choice but to meet with resilience. With mighty empa­thy hum­bled by their courage, Hol­land cat­a­logs the innu­mer­able strug­gles fac­ing a fam­i­ly en route to join rel­a­tives in Swe­den: keep­ing your phone charged while lost in the inter­na­tion­al woods, car­ing for infants and the elder­ly, being under­stood by the men bark­ing orders at you in a for­eign lan­guage. And in cru­cial con­trast with last year’s Tori and Loki­ta (which shares a cast mem­ber with Green Bor­der in the pro­found-eyed Joe­ly Mbun­du), her film knows to stop short of heap­ing full-bore sadism upon her har­ried sub­jects, mak­ing time for the respites of calm and play that the spir­it man­u­fac­tures for itself out of neces­si­ty in dire times.

It’s a tes­ta­ment to the harsh­ness of her polit­i­cal cri­tiques that Hol­land has already received death threats and gov­ern­men­tal con­dem­na­tion in her home of Poland, por­trayed here as a land of unfath­omable cru­el­ty punc­tured by scant beams of hope. But her broad­side against cal­lous­ness and indif­fer­ence speaks for itself and affirms the sanc­ti­ty of life through the super­hu­man dis­tance some will go to pro­tect theirs.