'Green Border' is a harrowing depiction of Poland's migrant crisis

There was a point pretty early on in director Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” when I wondered how much more of the movie I was going to be able to take. It’s a bruiser of a picture, the kind that can be daunting for a lot of audiences. I mean, try being at a barbecue where people are asking you for movie recommendations, then suggest a two-and-a-half-hour, black-and-white drama about the European refugee crisis and see how quickly everyone goes back to talking about the potato salad. I myself put off seeing the film for some time, and this is supposed to be my job.

And yet, if you can tough it out, this is a rewarding experience — harrowing yet unexpectedly hopeful in its depiction of human decency during the direst of circumstances. “Green Border” begins with a family fleeing Syria, lured to Belarus by phony propaganda promising easy passage to the European Union. It’s all a stunt by Putin crony Alexander Lukashenko, part of a plan to destabilize the EU with a flood of migrants and cause chaos like the Brexit vote. Our Syrian friends pick up a middle-aged woman from Afghanistan who has been going the journey alone. All of them immediately discover, to their horror and ours, that the crossing is nothing like what they were promised.

In response to this influx, the Polish government cordoned off the woods along the Belarusian border. It’s a primeval wilderness and no-man’s-land where media and humanitarian aid workers were not permitted. Abused by border guards, the refugees are shuttled and shoved back and forth between countries that don’t want them. (One person Holland interviewed while researching the film said they’d been sent across the border 26 times.) The refugees are political footballs being tossed from country to country, as both governments consider hordes of freezing, hungry and helpless people “human missiles” in a proxy war. It’s a tactic of deliberate dehumanization we see taking a heavy psychological toll on the sadistic guards, who drink heavily and behave monstrously. One of them hurls a pregnant woman over a razor-wire fence like he’s throwing a bag of trash into a neighbor’s yard.

The opening image of this verdant forest is abruptly drained of color, and Holland shoots the rest of the film in cool, low-contrast monochrome. She doesn’t linger on the atrocities with sappy music or slow motion, but rather renders everything matter-of-factly, which makes the casual cruelty even more chilling. Broken up into chapters, “Green Border” bounces around between an ensemble of characters briefly taking turns at center stage, as was the style of political issue films from the early aughts, like Steven Soderbergh’s terrific “Traffic” or Alejandro González  Iñárritu’s bloviating “Babel.” (They used to call these “hyperlink movies” back when they still called them hyperlinks.)

About an hour into the film, we meet Julia, a psychologist played with unfussy grace by Maja Ostaszewska. Well-to-do and recently widowed, Julia isn’t the kind of person who usually gets involved in political actions, but is quietly radicalized by what she witnesses. The film follows her transformation with a wonderfully understated wit, watching this prim and proper woman organizing with wild-haired anarchists. “Green Border” eventually blossoms into something of a heist picture, with Julia and her unlikely new friends plotting to rescue stranded migrants with a plan that becomes downright thrilling. It probably sounds strange to call a movie like this entertaining, yet the final reels are rousing — enormously satisfying without compromising the seriousness of the subject matter.

The 75-year-old Holland is no stranger to finding unexpected shades of grim material. Her hit 1990 WWII drama “Europa Europa” told the true story of a young Jewish boy hiding out in the Hitler Youth, getting not inconsiderable comic mileage out of situations in which he had to conceal his circumcision. (Her 1995 “Total Eclipse” starred a pre-“Titanic” Leonardo DiCaprio as doomed poet Arthur Rimbaud, and I’ve often wondered if his graphic sex scenes with David Thewlis’ Paul Verlaine are the reason the film remains unavailable on streaming services.) After winning the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Holland was condemned by Poland’s right-wing government. The justice minister compared the picture to Nazi propaganda, while President Andrzej Duda said “only pigs sit in cinemas.”

There must be a lot of pigs over there, because in Poland “Green Border” outgrossed “The Little Mermaid.” I doubt the film will have the same fate at the U.S. box office, but the third act does become quite the crowd-pleaser, with an attention to classical storytelling virtues and an egalitarian optimism that has fallen out of fashion in recent years. (Indeed, I think the only reason we’ve been spared insufferable think pieces decrying Julia as “a white savior” is that the people who write such things tend not to go see subtitled films that are two-and-a-half hours and in black-and-white.) It’s a movie about how despite how awful everything may seem, there are still some people out there who can be counted on to do the right thing.

Still, Holland can’t resist twisting the knife with a sly epilogue illustrating how just a few years later, in startling contrast to their horrific treatment of migrants seeking asylum from Islamic states, Poland embraced thousands of Ukraine refugees with open arms. Gee, I wonder what was different about them?

“Green Border” opens Friday, July 26 at Coolidge Corner Theatre.