Holland and Breillat: Green Border and Last Summer

A scene from Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border. (Photo: Agata Kubis)

The gorgeous opening shots of Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border reveal a lush lime-green expanse. It’s a dream landscape, symbolic of the free and happy future that refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and other oppressed or war-torn Middle Eastern and Asian countries set their hearts on when they cross the border from Belarus into Poland. But these images, like the movie’s title, are ironic: almost immediately, Holland and her first-rate cinematographer, Tomasz Naumiuk, shift into black and white and we never see color again.

The film, two and a half hours divided into four chapters and an epilogue, intercuts three stories. It begins with a family of Syrian refugees – Bashir (Jalal Atawil), his wife Amina (Dalia Naous), his father (Al Rashi Mohamad), whom we know only as Grandpa, and their three children – whose passage has been arranged by Bashir’s brother, safely in EU territory. On the plane to Belarus they befriend an Afghani named Leïla (Behi Djanati Atai); she begs a ride with them to the border with a driver who extorts money out of them before letting them out, when they’ve already paid a middleman for their passage. They have to slip under the wire and run into the woods on the other side. Bashir carries scars on his back, a punishment from ISIS soldiers for smoking during Ramadan; Leïla escaped by herself rather than waiting for the arrival of the Taliban. She becomes an unofficial member of Bashir and Amina’s family, a sort of aunt who teaches their eldest, Nur (Taim Aijan), a boy of ten or eleven, some English phrases and begs a farmer for apples and water to feed the hungry children; she also tracks their journey on the map on her phone. When they’re picked up by police, they’re put on a truck with other refugees that they’re told will take them to Germany and Sweden, but instead they’re hauled back to the Belarusian border, where one of the guards spills out the water he tried to overcharge Leïla outrageously for and beats Grandpa when he voices an objection, and one guard tosses another “tourist” (the guards’ smug term) a canteen full of broken glass. “Why are you doing this to us?” one of the refugees implores.

The answer is complicated. The Polish guards have been trained to believe that Russia is using the refugees as “live bullets” against the EU, that the children have been hired to soften their hearts and even that their phony parents blow smoke in their eyes to make them cry and look more pathetic. If you’ve seen Mystyslav Chernov’s stunning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, about the early days of the Russian attack on Ukraine, you’re likely to recall the scene near the end where a Russian minister tells an English journalist, after Chernov has managed to sneak his on-the-fly footage out of occupied Ukraine, that it was all faked. Moreover, the Polish guards, especially the more seasoned ones, are often racist. When they’re cruel, it’s because they can be, and because, as we know, the misery of others is often a provocation, especially when we’re surrounded by it and it flows without ceasing. The refugees are detained at the border unless they can find their way across and manage to hide from the guards. Eventually Bashir’s family is split up by border guards, and Nur winds up in Leïla’s care.

The second story is about Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), a novice Polish guard whose wife, Kasia (Malwina Buss), is pregnant. Kasia defends the guards to a woman in the supermarket who denigrates them for their mistreatment of the refugees, but when the job coarsens Jan and he comes home wasted, claiming that they all drink that way, she begs him to take a civilian job. He protests that he’s doing his duty, but the work begins to tear him apart. When he and a more experienced colleague find a corpse, the other guard explains that their orders are to throw the body to the Belarusian side of the border. Afterwards, alone in his car, Jan breaks down. Later in the film we see him searching a truck where a refugee is hidden in the back; Jan pretends not to see him and waves the driver past. When he gets home to Kasia, who’s asleep in their bed, he strips naked and stares at himself in the mirror, as if struggling to work out who he is.

The third story, which dominates the second half of the film, centers on Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a psychologist who follows a cry for help on her way home and finds Leïla and Nur mired in a swamp, and before her eyes – and ours – the little boy sinks. Leïla is brought to a hospital, where she leaves a message for Bashir and Amina, begging their forgiveness for her failure to keep Nur alive. (Then she disappears from the hospital and, ominously, drops out of the movie.) The experience radicalizes Julia, who joins a group of humanitarian activists working with refugees, led by Marta (Monika Frajczyk) and Maciek (Piotr Stramowski). But the rules they’re obligated to follow, which limit the area where they can look for people who need their help and oblige them to leave most of the poor souls they find – anyone who doesn’t choose to apply immediately for asylum – after they’ve patched them up are too restrictive for Julia. She wants to reunite a young Moroccan she finds, his foot injured, with his friends; they’re only an hour away but protocol forbids her and Marta and Maciek to take him to them, so she has to abandon him. She breaks protocol and returns later, but the only trace she finds of him is his torn passport. At the end she joins forces with Marta’s rebellious sister Zuku (Jasmina Polak) to form their own humanitarian activist band.

Holland, who has worked in Poland and Germany and Hollywood, became a major world filmmaker when she released Europa Europa nearly three and a half decades ago, and that movie, about a Jewish boy who hides in plain sight in Germany during the Holocaust by enlisting in Hitler Youth, hasn’t lost its ability to startle viewers. Perhaps because she’s so prolific and her film work has appeared side by side with a great deal of TV work – episodes of Treme, Cold Case, The Killing and other series – it’s been hard to keep a focus on her. (Her work for the small screen has been necessarily erratic; I saw her adaptation of Mikal Gilmore’s book Shot in the Heart about his brother Gary Gilmore, which was mediocre, and I wasn’t impelled to chase down her version of Rosemary’s Baby.) But some of her work that didn’t attract much notice on its release is worth circling back to, like her 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel The Secret Garden and the 1999 The Third Miracle, in which Ed Harris does some of his most compelling screen acting as an American priest whose assignment as a Positor for the Vatican seeking to evaluate a case for sainthood throws his own shaky faith into relief. When Holland made Mr. Jones five years ago, with James Norton as the Welsh journalist who uncovered the story of Stalin’s man-made famine in the Ukraine, I vowed I’d never miss another one of her pictures. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a political exposé that was at once so urgent and so poetic. (The movie she followed it with, Charlatan, wasn’t quite in the same class – it was merely excellent.) In Green Border she drops the poetry; all of it is in those tantalizing opening shots. This movie is an SOS, and it’s brutal, though, like 20 Days in Mariupol, it has a cleansing effect. Holland takes us deep into the heart of despair, but Green Border isn’t a documentary, so unlike Chernov she is able to help us find out way out of it. We see how Julia becomes an activist and, with the help of her favorite client, a middle-aged man with substance abuse issues who rages against the repugnant policies of his country, she saves two young refugees. We see how Jan fights conformity and despair as a guard and clings to his decency. (Ostaszewska and Wlosok give powerful, psychologically detailed performances.) The film is a major accomplishment.

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker in Catherine Breillat's Last Summer.

Another gifted female European filmmaker working at the top of her game this year is Catherine Breillat, whose Last Summer is her first picture in a decade. Breillat’s movies, like Romance and Fat Girl and Sex Is Comedy, have always been provocative. Last Summer is a remake of a Danish film called Queen of Hearts, but its origins are really classical – it’s an updated version of the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which the Neoclassical playwright Jean Racine turned into one of the greatest of all tragedies. Phaedra, married to Theseus, the King of Athens, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus; when he rejects her advances and tells his father, she protests that it was he who came on to her and, in fact, raped her. In Last Summer Théo (Samuel Kircher), the teenage son of a divorced couple, moves in with his father, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), and Pierre’s second wife, Anne (Léa Drucker), a highly respected lawyer, when he’s fed up living with his mother and has gotten into trouble with the law. Pierre and Théo have a historically tense relationship; the boy resents his father for the mistakes he’s made in raising him. He goes so far as to accuse Pierre of adopting a pair of Chinese girls with Anne because he feels guilty over those mistakes. But Anne likes her stepson; she appreciates his warmth with her daughters and she finds his bravado and playfulness appealing. These qualities are also sexy, and when he makes a play for her she finds she’s unable to resist him. First her sister (Clotilde Courau) finds out about them and seems to be about to tell Pierre, then changes her mind. Then, partly out of anger when Anne wants to stop sleeping with him and partly out of remorse and partly out of an adolescent boy’s inability to keep anything to himself, Théo confesses everything to his father during an intended bonding weekend at the family chalet. Like Phaedra, Anne brazens it out with Pierre, playing the role of the injured wife whose husband believes his untrustworthy son over her.

It would be easy, especially in our current culture, to treat the material as a morality play in which the mother’s sexual inappropriateness with her husband’s son makes her a villain who brings disaster on everyone and must be punished. Of course Breillat hasn’t the slightest interest in that kind of reductionism. Neither did Racine, who was a great playwright. In his version of the story, Phaedra’s sin is immoderation, and it’s a social sin, not a moral one; the play was written in the eighteenth century, not during the Renaissance and not during the Romantic era. Yet because Racine is a great playwright, though his Phaedra is punished, her passion makes her the most sympathetic character in the play. Hippolytus is wronged, but we don’t feel much for this cold fish who was trained by his Amazonian mother to prefer feats of physical daring over sex – at least we don’t until he falls in love, with Princess Aricia. Breillat’s rewrite of the story gives the transgressive mother a fierceness that emerges from her desperation. Racine wrote in a servant-confidante for Phaedra who, out of love for her mistress, urges her to make the rape charge against Hippolytus, but there’s no intermediary in Last Summer. (The sister, Mina, hardly counts when she opts not to tell her brother-in-law about Anne and Théo but decides instead to forgive her sister.) And the ending is, to my mind, more shocking than Racine’s dramatization.

The three leading actors all do splendid work, especially Drucker, and the direction is amazing. As a technician Breillat is right in the line of the great French filmmakers from Renoir and Carné and Clair through Clément and Clouzot and the French New Wave masters. Each of the three sex scenes between Drucker and Kircher is shot differently, to illuminate a different aspect and aftermath of the coupling. In the first, Breillat shoots close in and focuses on Drucker’s face as she reaches orgasm. In the second, he goes down on her before he enters her, and the camera lingers on her face on the pillow in afterglow. It’s only in the third encounter that the shot is balanced between the two lovers. Breillat never repeats herself; she uses her camera to create a fluid, dynamic narrative. Her work is probing and sensual and elegant, all at the same time. And, like any great filmmaker, her instinct for staging is just as sure and yielding as her feeling for camera placement and editing. In one scene, Anne and Pierre sit at a table on the patio while Théo hovers in the background, wandering restlessly through the house like a ghost whose presence neither of them is aware of.

Given the sporadic distribution of foreign movies (an old problem, exacerbated by post-Covid complications) and the lack of any consistent source for keeping track of what’s worth looking at, even dedicated movie lovers may not have noticed that over the last five or six years many of the most interesting films have come out of France, like Revoir Paris, Other People’s Children, One Fine Morning and La Syndicaliste, all from 2023. All four also showcase significant leading performances by actresses – one by Isabelle Huppert, one by Léa Seydoux and two by a remarkable performer named Virginie Efira whom most Americans haven’t yet discovered. This may be another golden age of French movies. I hope it doesn’t just pass us by.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.