Brushing and scraping sounds heard over white noise bring us into the opening scene of Ida, a black-and-white film that follows a novice nun’s journey of self-discovery in 1960s Poland.
The shuffling of feet and crunching of soil accompany colorless shots of dusty countryside roads in Poland under the communist dictatorship, nearly twenty years after Nazi occupation. Sheets billow in the wind on clotheslines and chickens cluck in the yard.
Though this kind of simplicity in Ida has been criticized as vague, the sparse dialogue, silent glimpses into Ida’s thoughts, and visual symbols provide ample information to give the viewer insight into her character transformation. The grey complexity of human nature is revealed through the simplicity of the black-and-white views, commonplace sounds and terse dialogue. In a sensorily underwhelming reality, Ida’s story fully comes to life in the viewer’s imagination.
The movie begins by following Anna, a teenage girl raised in a post-World War II Polish convent and about to take her vows to become a nun. Before Anna takes her vows, the mother superior sends her to meet her aunt Wanda, who tells Anna that she is Jewish and her birth name is Ida Lebenstein. Wanda is a cynical judge who condemns those deemed trivially anti-Communist to terrible punishments. Her work has brought her wealth, including her own apartment and car—rare in poor post-war Poland—but not, it seems, satisfaction. She smokes, brings home strange men from bars, and drinks heavily and frequently.
Ida asks Wanda to see her parents’ graves. Since many of those killed in the Holocaust have unmarked graves or no graves at all, Ida and Wanda search for the fate of Ida’s parents, and as we later learn, also the fate of Wanda’s young son. They discover that a Pole who was hiding the Lebensteins from the Nazis killed the whole family but spared baby Ida and left her in a convent. After Ida and Wanda rebury their family, Wanda commits suicide by jumping out of a window and Ida returns to the convent.
When the aunt and niece embark on a journey to find what remains of their family, Anna desperately clings to what she knows—her prayers, her nun’s habit, and the Bible. While Wanda does all the talking, questioning, arguing, and even threatening in attempts to get information about the graves, Anna stands outside silently and doesn’t even admit to being related to her parents. It’s difficult to tell if Anna feels or thinks anything at all. She refuses to partake in worldly pleasures like drinking, smoking, dancing, and eating doughnuts, so her actions don’t disclose any internal changes. She perfectly maintains her humble, saintly demeanor. Too perfectly. She is trusted and revered by everyone she meets—police who arrest her aunt for drunk-driving, Polish villagers, and even her parents’ murderer: “God be with you, sister,” “bless my baby, sister,” “I know I can trust you, sister.”
Just as one might start to imagine a smug self-righteousness under that blank stare, her stone-cold expressionless exterior starts to crack. For the first time in the film, she discloses something about herself in a conversation. While talking to Lis, a young saxophonist who hitchhikes in Wanda’s car, she says “I was raised in a convent. And now I’m Jewish too.” Because she doesn’t talk much, this short conversation stands out and is the first explicit hint for the viewer that Ida is not perfectly emotionless and that she has been accepting her newfound identity, albeit slowly. The next day she finally introduces herself as her parents’ daughter and comforts her distraught aunt as they learn the details of the murder of the family.
After Ida and Wanda rebury the bones in their family graveyard, Ida returns to the convent. With her usual blank expression she makes garlands to take her vows. But then, in stark contrast to the expressionless faces of nuns and the sounds of tapping spoons against bowls, she giggles during a convent meal. It’s the kind of uncontrollable giggle that slips out at the most inappropriate moments. She later stares as novice nuns bathe. Maybe she’s remembering Wanda’s one-night stands. Maybe she is thinking about her own sexuality. Either way, these brief moments clearly show that she has changed and sees routine convent life with fresh eyes.
When Wanda commits suicide Ida once again leaves the convent to attend the funeral. She spends the night in her aunt’s empty apartment, trying on heels and a night dress, smoking her first cigarette and drinking vodka from the bottle. The next morning, Ida comes to the funeral without her habit.
At the funeral, she sees Lis again. Afterwards, Ida listens to his band, he teaches her how to dance and they have sex. Lis invites her to travel to the seaside with his band and Ida asks “what then?” He suggests they can “get a dog, get married, have kids.” He offers her everything he can—music, love, and family, but he can’t tell her what will come then. He can’t promise her fulfillment and salvation.
In the morning, while Lis is asleep, Ida sits up in bed and silently looks around the room. She goes over the conversation with Lis in her mind. She puts on her nun’s habit and leaves.
Ida starts out as a rather predictable character—Anna. Becoming a nun is a natural choice for Anna, given that she has never experienced life outside of the convent. But over the course of her journey, with Ida becoming a central part of her identity, she sacrifices this uninformed peace of mind. The transformed Ida has choices to make. At the beginning of the film, Wanda insisted that Ida’s vows are meaningless if Ida has never experienced what she vows to give up. Now Ida knows what she’s giving up. In the last moments of the film, as Ida walks down a country dirt road the director comes to the viewer’s aid. Music plays in the background– Bach’s “I Call To You, Lord Jesus Christ.” Finally, the viewer has no doubt that Ida has chosen to take her vows.
The music confirms what the viewer is already prepared for. Ida’s path is shown even earlier. On the night before Wanda’s funeral, Ida puts on Wanda’s heels and drunkenly wobbles to the same window from which Wanda recently jumped. But she doesn’t open it. Instead Ida twirls, engulfed in the lace curtain—either a veil or a cocoon. She twirls slowly and then faster and faster until she falls and disappears from the screen, like Wanda. But she doesn’t fall to her death. Instead Ida is reborn and, like a butterfly, emerges out of her cocoon with a past, roots, and life experience. If the curtain is a veil and Ida is the bride, she is the bride of Jesus Christ. This ordinary curtain encapsulates Ida’s slow acceptance of her past, her transformation, her rebirth, and her final destination. No complex details are needed to capture Ida’s journey.