GREY MATTERS
As elegant as it is unnerving, as beautiful as it is bleak, Polish film Ida is a story best seen on the big screen
It is unnerving — and inevitable — to describe the black-and-white cinematography in Ida as very beautiful. Inevitable, because Ida thrives on the formal elegance of visual composition, when each frame is austere without being harsh, cold without being judgemental, and with the characters often filmed with a lot of space above their head, dwarfing them under the weight of the skies, the ceiling, the world.
That’s why the monochrome beauty of the film is also unnerving. The dark forest of Poland in 1962 and the crumbling, postwar decay, physical and probably moral, are the setting of the unearthed horrors and the ghost of the Holocaust that the film’s characters must confront.
The power of the image is so strong that Ida is a film best seen on the big screen — and the sole opportunity is here when the film is a headline act at the Polish Film Festival, which begins on Sunday at SF CentralWorld. Ida will be screened on Wednesday, at 9pm.
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, Ida was shot by two cinematographers, Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal. The mood is sombre, they sky is lead-coloured, but this isn’t an exercise in miserabilism — amid the glum Poland of the 1960s, this is a story of a young woman’s awakening and the wound that won’t be healed. Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice nun in a convent who’s about to take her vows. She visits her aunt, her sole family member, who casually tells the young woman that she is Jewish and to become a Roman Catholic nun would be odd indeed.
Ida wants to look for the graves of her parents, to which the aunt says to the young nun: “What if you go there and discover there is no God?” From then on, the two women set out on a road trip to visit their old family home, only to find something more horrifying.
In some ways, Lenczewski’s and Zal’s cinematography bears some resemblance to Fred Keleman’s work for Hungarian director Bela Tarr — the precise framing, the grey sky, the metaphysical quality of the mundane, the Pre-Raphaelite spiritualism. The difference is that while Keleman’s work is infused with heavy metaphor and transcendental ambition, the images in Ida serve the narrative and characters. In Keleman’s, the black is menacing; in Ida, the grey is resplendent. There are no long takes or fancy tracking shots; the editing is classical here, and Ida is refreshingly compact at only 82 minutes, a feat for a film with such a large and expansive subject.
Let me say it again, watching it on the big screen is an experience. Ida is a frontrunner at Oscar’s foreign language category — despite the Russian film Leviathan scoring a surprise win at the Golden Globes on Sunday. Pawlikowski, the director, is a Pole who’s spent most of his life in London, but with Ida he’s made a film steeped in the Polish spirit and European history — a film about the Holocaust that’s complex, unpredictable and filtered through an individual’s perception.
What was the last Polish film you saw? Probably Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, which came out in 2002. Ida doesn’t carry that film’s broad, populist sweep, but it’s no less important in our understanding of the country — and again, of European history. That said, there are five other films in the Polish Film Festival, and they tell historical as well as contemporary stories that are worth contemplating.
Walesa: Man Of Hope is a biopic of Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader in the 1970s. It was directed by Andrzej Wajda, one of Poland’s most celebrated directors. Gods is a medical drama about a Polish doctor’s quest to perform the country’s first heart transplant.
One Way Ticket To The Moon is a roadmovie comedy about a young man who attempts to lose his virginity before he joins the navy. Fanciful is a drama about a 15-year-old girl’s emotional rite of passage. Life Feels Good is a drama about a boy with cerebral palsy, set in the transitional period of Polish politics.
What if you go there and discover there is no God?