IDA Film Review
by Art & Film Mentor Lucy Johns
A beautiful innocent meets, by chance at a deserted country crossroad, a handsome hitch-hiking saxophone player. Anyone who knows their Bunuel settles back for a late entry into the modernist anti-clerical project. A stark, minimalist film out of Poland, the Polish-born, Oxford-educated director Pawel Pawlikowski diverts cultural defiance into much darker territory. His film "Ida" grapples with Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
The eponymous Ida is about to take her vows in a nunnery where she appears hard-working, serious, content. At meals the nuns are silent, cutlery tinkling noisily as they eat with downcast eyes. Summoned by the Mother Superior, Ida encounters one more test before she can pursue her life choice. She must visit an aunt who refused, despite numerous entreaties from the convent, to raise her as family. This aunt is another species. She drinks, sleeps around, smokes incessantly. A brief scene in which she's almost unrecognizable hints at a reason: she's a judge, despairing of the inane cases she is obliged, in Communist Poland, to try. She knows who Ida is without introduction and knows why Ida has been sent. Ida must learn her history before immurement in the only home she knows. Whether she has the will to choose that life without knowing anything of betrayal, desire, the hellish destruction practiced by the very peasants who ask her blessing, is the challenge her Mother Superior has the wisdom to impose.
The story is provocative and unsettling. Ida and Aunt Wanda seem to represent two profoundly contrary aspects of Polish identity. Ida barely speaks, we learn little of what she thinks. She can respond to unexpected opportunity but she lacks the imagination to cope with freedom. Her religion saves her sanity as it once did her life. Does she symbolize present-day Poland, more intent on security than possibility? Aunt Wanda, played with transparent skill by Agata Kulesza, is far more complex, a survivor, a risk-taker, who finds no surcease from the grief Ida's sudden appearance forces her to face. Her vast experience creates a vivid personality but she has no recourse for her sorrow. Pawlikowski, who co-wrote the script, has created a fascinating and moving conflict between lust for justice and passive resignation in the face of pervasive proclivity for crime and cover-up.
And even that is complicated. As the Holocaust engulfed rural Poland, this peasant hid Jews, that one killed them, sometimes even the killers backed off the most defenseless. All agreed, however, on absolute silence about this history. Paradoxically, property, target of the Communist state, provides ineradicable evidence of timeless, immoral transgressions. So what should be done. Take it back? Punish the beneficiaries? Let them die in peace?
Shot in black and white by two cinematographers, Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal, "Ida" shows from the first frame that somebody has a talent for off-center, symbolically off-kilter, imagery. A statue of Christ is raised up in a depression reminiscent of a grave, an image that will be echoed by a man deep in a pit he's dug himself, obviously more than once. The novitiates sprawl as though crucified on what must be the icy stone floor of the chapel. An aspiring nun showers in a transparent robe. The tow truck for a car off the road is a pair of magnificent draft horses. Ida undoes her hair in front of a mirror, surely for the first time. Almost architectural scenes abound: a bed made up in a church hallway so confined the mattress barely fits, let alone a person; a couple talks silhouetted against a translucent wall patterned with iron trellises that flow in all directions, as this relationship might. "Ida" is unusually successful at embedding philosophical conundrums in arresting visual effects. This isn't easy: think Terrance Malik's "The Tree of Life."
Threaded throughout the film is the Catholicism suffusing Poland through a thousand years of torments. The contemporary representatives come off well, especially the nuns. Yet Catholicism engendered the anti-Semitism that bred and fed the Holocaust throughout Europe, Poland not excepted. Why Ida personally and "Ida" the film completely ignore this is as deep a puzzle as those the director otherwise ably presents.