Green Bor­der review – bril­liant and tense

In Agniesz­ka Holland’s bruis­ing, ulti­mate­ly gal­vanis­ing 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. 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 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 Two news­reels, and the spec­tre 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 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 the 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 which they have no choice but to meet with resilience. 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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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