Summary:
A young novice nun on the verge of taking her vows discovers a family secret dating back to German occupation.
My Thoughts:
When wars are over and the soldiers that fought in those wars have been planted beneath the ground, or, if they’re fortunate enough, returned home, the presence of those wars can still be felt for years after, like an invisible, festering, stinking wound that stubbornly refuses to heal. “Ida” is about those unseen wounds. It’s about the lives lost (figuratively and literally) in the wake of wars. It’s about the guilt one feels for past sins, how those sins can affect the lives of those who never had knowledge of those sins, and how, sometimes, the inability to move forward from the past can be a death sentence, even if those suffering are still walking around and sucking oxygen.
This film is a haunting tragedy in every sense of the phrase. Ida felt to me almost like a ghost story, but while our main character has yet to die, she also has yet to live. I watched “Ida” last night, and I can already tell that this is a film that will stay with me for quite some time.
“What sort of sacrifice are these vows of yours?”
Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) has lived at a Catholic orphanage from a very young age, training to become a nun. Shortly before she is set to take her vows, the mother superior informs Anna for the first time that she has a Jewish heritage, and that she has an aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza, “Cold War”) who is still alive. The Mother Superior suggests that Anna go stay with her for a while before taking her vows. Though Anna is resistant, she agrees to do so, and when she arrives, Wanda isn’t particularly happy to see her, though, eventually, she asks Anna to stay on for a few days. Anna asks where her parents are buried, and Wanda says that she doesn’t know, but she can find out. Together, the two of them embark on a journey to the place where her parent’s last hid from the Germans, and Anna gets her first bittersweet taste of the world outside the Orphanage.
This was my first Pawel Pawlowski film, but it certainly won’t be the last. Even from the first few shots, I knew I was in for a treat. Pawlowski’s cinematography and direction is simply transcendent; every shot has subtext, every single frame has meaning. His direction dances on the same level of brilliance that Ozu, Tarkovsky and Bergman dance on, and I don’t at all say that lightly. The mis-en-scene for this film is breathtaking. It’s hard to really talk about the pervasive yet subtle symbolism in Paweloski’s cinematography without at least giving some examples, so I’ll touch on a few that really hit home with me.
Right after Anna first meets Wanda and expects to stay with her for a few days, Wanda rejects the idea and tells her she has to go back to the convent. This scene is shot from a distance, outside a stone building with iron fences; it’s as if the building behind Wanda is representative of her own walls that she’s put up to isolate herself. Wanda has had an incredibly hard life, and Wanda has spent a long time building walls to keep herself stable, to let down those defenses would be like letting in a person who is a known enemy to a fortress. There’s another shot where Anna first talks to a boy, a saxophone player whom has expressed interest in her. The conversation takes place in front of a window with beautifully intricate trellis, and it looks as if the patterns are simply exploding from Anna’s head, as if she’s having her mind opened for the first time. It’s in this scene that she thinks she’s getting her first taste of what love is like. Another scene, towards the end of the film, shows Anna praying to God near a statue of Christ, and around the statue on all sides, there is a mound (almost like Christ fell to earth and created a crater). As Anna prays to God inside the confining walls of this crater, it seems as if she is both isolated from the world and incredibly close to God, which is exactly the state she’s in.
In general, the cinematography for this film was astoundingly gorgeous. It’s shot in a stark black and white, the aspect ratio is 4:3, and the way many shots are framed feels unusual when compared to classical framing; sometimes it adds to the beauty of the film, and sometimes, to the tragedy of it all. If you were to take almost any frame from any scene of this film, you could blow up the print and hang it on a wall as art. Again, going back to my comparisons to Bergman, the cinematography felt as if it would feel right at home in a film like “Persona” or “Hour of the Wolf”.
The writing in this movie is also wonderful. Almost everything that happens happens beneath the surface. Many of the conversations touch only on the surface level of everything that is happening, and we the viewers have to be paying attention in order to understand all the nuances of certain scenes. For example, in one of the first scenes, when Anna talks to the Mother Superior, the Mother Superior informs her that before she takes her vows, Anna must go out to see her only living relative: her Jewish aunt. From this scene, though none of it is said explicitly, we learn that Anna was dropped off at the orphanage from when she was a child, for some reason her Aunt never came to get her, and Anna herself has never really set foot outside of the orphanage.
SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING
Near the end of the film, after Wanda kills herself by jumping out her apartment window, Anna returns to Wanda’s home and tries to take advice Wanda had given her before, advice to go out and see the world. Anna smokes a cigarette, she drinks a bottle of vodka, she goes out dancing and looses her virginity to the saxophone player, and then, when the two are laying in bed post-sex, the saxophone player asks her what she is doing later. He asks her to come with her to the beach, and she asks, and then what? The Sax player says, jokingly, that then they’ll get a dog, then they’ll get married, and then they’ll have kids… And then what will happen? Anna asks. “You know, the usual. Life,” the boy says.
Anna leaves the boy and returns to the convent. In a sense, she’s turning away from a life she was never given. She will never be a young innocent girl with the whole world before her; that was stolen away from her before she had a concept of herself. Though the end of this film ends with Anna, in a sense, wholly giving her life to God, I think even God would see this film as a tragedy. What would’ve happened had her parents not been killed? Who could she have become? Who would Ida have been were it not for the sins of those she never knew?
Verdict:
There is something so powerfully poetic about what Pawilowski is trying to say about the effect of wars and the way that we still feel their gravity of some actions today. This is a beautiful tragedy, one that feels like a yearning for both things that have been lost and things that could’ve been. Mourn those who have been lost, mourn those whose lives have been afflicted, and pray for healing, even if that healing might never come.
Review Written By: