An elegant little tale of grand, sad themes
Young nun uncovers family secrets in post-Second World War Poland
REVIEW
Ida
(out of five) Starring: Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska Directed by: Pawel Pawlikowski Running time: 80 minutes (In Polish with English subtitles) An air of melancholy — the weight of history, a feeling of inevitable tragedy — hangs over Ida, an examination of a small piece of Jewish history in Second World War Poland. It’s an elegant miniature that illuminates grander, sadder themes.
It tells a simple story. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice in a convent somewhere in the Polish countryside.
On the eve of taking her vows, the mother superior advises her to visit her only living relative, Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), who lives in a nearby town.
Anna is a pretty nun with a heartbreaking dimple (three dimples when she smiles, as her aunt notes) and a sweet disposition.
Wanda is a blowsy woman: smart, cynical, alcoholic. She has had the sentiment driven out of her and although she is a judge — the film is set in 1960s Poland, a time just far enough from the years of Nazi occupation to permit vague and convenient amnesia — she lives in a haze of booze and casual sex. “I’m a slut and you’re a little saint,” she tells Anna.
Wanda tells her niece she is “a Jewish nun.”
Anna is really Ida Lebenstein, the surviving member of a family that hid from the Nazis and was murdered, and she was raised in a Catholic orphanage.
Wanda will take her to the small village where they once lived, in a farmhouse now occupied by the family that gave them shelter and probably murdered them, to find where her parents are buried.
Director Pawel Pawlikowski (The Woman in the Fifth), who was born in Poland and now lives in England, returns to his native country for a story that has a timeless classicism.
It is filmed in luminescent black and white, and like the work of Danish master Carl Dreyer, it melds formalism and expressionism: blank walls, shafts of light casting patterns, a studied placement of faces on the screen so that the spaces float above them (the subtitles are sometimes in the sky) and the action is cast downward, well below heaven.
Anna glows with religious innocence: Townsfolk accept her as part of the Catholic mystique and she maintains her habits of prayer and reflection, but you can see in Trzebuchowska’s face the beginnings of doubt.
That doubt is fully formed in Wanda, and Kulesza gives her a combination of power, lost power, grief, strength and boozy surrender.
“What if you discover there is no God?” she warns her niece before their road trip, and that becomes the subtext of Ida: not the loss of a deity, but the search for what might replace it.
Wanda and Anna work on one another in small ways, abetted by a handsome jazz musician (Dawid Ogrodnik) whom they meet on the way and whose performance of John Coltrane’s Naima is a honk of modernism across the bleak socialist landscape. Change is coming, even here, but what came before is buried in a shallow grave, waiting to be disinterred.
“What happened, happened,” says a man who knows the truth and is willing to forget it.
But some things are never over.