‘ANGRY HARVEST’: CROP OF DEPRESSION

If seriousness of intent and a pair of fine performances were enough, Agnieszka Holland’s “Angry Harvest,” a nominee for best foreign-language Oscar, might have enough to recommend it. (It opens today at the Beverly Center Cineplex.) Alas, they are not.

For all the director’s attempts to add suspense to the story of a seesaw relationship between a beautiful Jewish fugitive and a repressed Catholic farmer who hides her in his cellar during the German occupation of his small Polish village, the film remains opaque, lugubrious and didactic.

Holland, who with Paul Hengge adapted the screenplay from a novel by Herrmann Field, is concerned with morality during a period when all moral boundaries seem to have been obliterated.

Leon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), son of a stableman before the war, is now a middle-aged man of moderate means via black-market trading in this frantic wartime period. The woman he secretes is an upper-class Viennese, Rosa (Elisabeth Trissenaar), who was on her way with her husband and child to a concentration camp when somehow they managed to hurl themselves off the train. Starved, bruised and feverish, she is a pitiful sight when Leon takes her in, in spite of the dangers from the Germans for anyone sheltering Jews.

Rosa’s life in the peasant Leon’s basement has three phases: her illness--during which he is the center of her existence; her recovery--while he becomes more and more attracted to her, and she has the upper hand--and finally her decline, after a bizarre period in which they play a ghastly parody of married life. The two even get into theological debates; to keep up his fiction to himself that they will marry after the war, Leon insists that she learn the New Testament, and an outright holy war develops.

During all this Rosa must be hidden from anyone’s knowledge, although it’s hard to see how her presence and/or his wildly suspicious behavior could help but be noticed. All the while Leon refuses to help other landed Jews in his village, desperate to sell their land for a pittance to pay for hiding places.

Mueller-Stahl and Trissenaar, both recognizable from their work with Fassbinder, are exceptional, far finer than their material, but the character of Leon is in every way strange, tortured and unpleasant. We may come to understand his motives but nothing about the man moves us to empathy.

The repetitiousness of the action and the deeply depressing material combine to make us feel like the imprisoned Rosa by the film’s ironic close, bursting out of the theater for a few gulps of fresh air.