Category Archives: Film review

A review of the 2014 film “Ida”

Ida: The Jewish Nun

Film review

From the beginning of Ida, religion is central to the film’s development: the first scenes are mostly close-ups on various religious symbols in the convent, like crosses, a statue of Jesus, or the nuns’ habits. The audience understands within the first five minutes of the film that religion has been the main factor in shaping the life of Anna, the protagonist. She is a novice nun who was abandoned at the convent as an infant, and is about to take her vows. The viewer discovers quickly that Anna is in fact a Jewish girl named Ida and, alongside her, we learn that almost her entire family was killed during the Second World War. Her only living relative is her aunt Wanda, from whom she learns her family’s tragic history. Wanda appears to be a direct rejection of the vows of piety, chastity and poverty Ida is preparing to take: she is a heavy drinker, a chain smoker, and has frequent sexual encounters with strangers. This tension proves central to Ida’s development: there are two paths that she can take: she can go back to the convent and take her vows or she can stay with her aunt and live a life filled with earthly pleasures and disappointments. She learns throughout the film what life outside the convent may entail: love (which she learns through her romantic and sexual interaction with Lis, a man that she and Wanda meet on the road), loss (through her family history and the death of her aunt), tragedy, and maybe even redemption.

The tension between her two options is made clear throughout the film, as the main focus is placed on Wanda and Ida. The rest of the characters have very few lines and don’t make frequent or lengthy appearances; Wanda and Ida spend the majority of the film in proximity to each other. In these scenes, the two protagonists are portrayed as diametrically opposed. Ida is completely innocent and does not know about life outside of the convent; she has been protected her whole life from reality. Her innocence may slowly fade throughout the film, but she does not lose her faith. Wanda, on the other hand, has seen so much tragedy and violence that she has lost all faith, though it is clear that she used to be a “true believer” in the communist cause. In fact, the reason she was not killed during the war like the rest of her family is because she was part of the anti-Nazi resistance. In order to cope with her guilt and loss of faith, she numbs herself constantly with alcohol and sex to help distance herself from her terrible past and grim reality. Though Wanda may gain some degree of hope—and even faith—from her time with Ida, her suicide toward the end of the movie makes it clear that she could not survive her grief.

This contrast between the two protagonists is emphasized during a scene in which Ida states that she wants to go find where her family is buried. At this point Wanda asks Ida, “what if you go there and discover there is no God?” She knows that this experience will be disturbing and may shake Ida’s belief system—her religion and her faith, which are the basis of her entire identity. Then, Wanda smiles and says, in an almost patronizing tone, “I know, God is everywhere”. Here, the viewer understands that believing in God, and keeping her faith, will be a way for Ida to be able to cope with learning about her family’s past.

However, the director, Paweł Pawlikowski, did not make this film to convey any particular religious message or even to represent religion in a favorable way. It is made clear that religion is often used as an excuse for silence or as a way to cover up heinous crimes: we learn that the priest who lived in the same town (Piaska) as Ida’s parents during the war claims to not know anything about them. We also see learn that the Skibas—the family who hid then killed Ida and Wanda’s family during the war—are deeply Christian. When Ida is in their home discovering the truth about her family, she stands in a doorway, where there is a large cross the wall above her head, and when Ida first arrives at the house, she is asked to bless the family’s crying baby. These two instances make clear the social privileges that Ida has because she is a nun. Moreover, she was not killed as an infant because she was able to pass for a gentile. As such, religion is represented in a very complicated and nuanced way, which allows the viewer to see some of the elements that are not given much attention or detail in the movie, like politics.

Religion is used as a conduit for the viewer to be able to understand the multiple political elements that complicate the plot and movie background, since the political context is not made entirely clear: the war is only referred to briefly in the movie, and even then there are only allusions to things that happened to Ida’s family during that time. The audience understands the historical context through references to religion and/or religious identity—chosen or inherited, which allows the filmmakers to not clarify in depth the movie’s historical or political context.

The audience also understands how deeply Roman Catholicism is intertwined with Polish national identity, as it is more frequently talked about than communism. In fact, there are only two obvious references to politics and the state: one, when Wanda is at work as a judge and two, at her funeral—where a government official reads an emotionless eulogy about “Comrade Wanda’s” great contributions to “making a new Poland.” These scenes both serve to help us understand the fundamental tragedy of Wanda’s life: she tells Ida that she had no idea what she had been fighting for during the war. It is clear that while Wanda once had faith in this system, she has lost it entirely. It is also crucial to explore why the film chooses to highlight religion, given the fact that it is based in Poland during the country’s communist era. Though Polish communism was inherently anti-religion, many of the film’s characters are deeply Catholic. This demonstrates that religion serves as a tool to create and maintain individual identity in a politically totalitarian country, just as faith provides Ida with a reprieve from the harrowing reality that she faces upon learning the truth about her family.

Ironically, it doesn’t appear as though the filmmakers are making any overall comment on religion or the role of religion in Ida’s life. It is simply provides a perspective to better understand her history and her life. This is indicative of the film itself, which uses cinematic simplicity to convey deeply complex themes and realities.

Ida Remembers

Film review

In a film with little dialogue and fewer than a dozen characters, director Pawel Pawlikowski does a remarkable job portraying Poland’s complex and fragmented memory of World War II, the Holocaust and the post-war government. Ida follows a young girl as she unravels the threads of the many perspectives that existed in Poland in the early 1960s and decides which ones to weave into her own identity.

The film begins with Anna, a novice at a Catholic convent in the countryside, about to take her vows and become a nun. The Mother Superior orders her to visit her last remaining relative, an aunt, before she makes her final decision. Wanda Gruz opens the door of an untidy apartment filled with cigarette smoke and empty liquor bottles. Once a scantily clad man has removed himself to the bathroom, she informs her niece that her name is not Anna but Ida, and that her family is Jewish.

These first few scenes explore the post-war identity of the Polish Catholic church and the remainder of the Jewish population, and reflect on the magnitude of the damage each suffered during the war. Particularly in the areas of Poland annexed by Germany, the Catholic clergy was persecuted  and many convents were closed. Ida shows a convent in disrepair, yet still standing, as the nuns go about their lives much as they did before the war. While the convent may be damaged, Wanda Gruz’s entire way of life is destroyed. Agata Trzebuchowska’s portray of ‘Red’ Wanda, former Soviet prosecutor and dedicated communist, reveals a lonely, disillusioned, and conflicted character.  When Ida appears on her doorstep, her memories of the Jewish community’s fate come rushing back and she begins to relive the pain of her past.

As Ida and Wanda investigate the fate of Ida’s parents, Pawlikowski confronts the troubled relationship between Polish Jews and their Christian neighbors during the Nazi occupation. It is left up to the viewer to decide why the man who was hiding Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son suddenly turned on them and killed them. The man, Feliks, now living in the home of Ida’s parents, displays signs of deep-seated guilt over his part in the death of the previous owners. However, when Feliks makes a deal with Ida to show her her parents’ final resting place, he makes a clear reference to one incentive that caused Poles to turn on their Jewish neighbors: lust for their wealth. In exchange for letting Ida say a final farewell to her parents, he extracts a promise from her never to make a claim on her parents’ property. In spite of his apparent shame and regret, he still falls victim to the same prejudice and greed that likely caused him to become a murderer years before.

Both Feliks’ confession in the graveyard and Wanda’s abrupt suicide bring to the surface the painful process of remembering the terror of wartime. Feliks and Wanda have both blocked out the past and moved on with their lives, only to have their memories brought back to haunt them years later by Ida. Ida also struggles to regain a sense of herself after discovering the split in her identity caused by the war. When she returns to the convent with the intention of taking her vows, she is unable to put aside what she has discovered, and no longer feels ready to become a nun. It is only after a few wild days of high heels, liquor, and intimacy that she feels she has made peace with the part of herself that giggles in the silence of a convent mealtime. All these realizations parallel the conflicts and pain present in Poland even today, as the past continues to resurface and challenge the beliefs of the descendants of an entire generation: Jews, Catholics, and former Communists alike.

Ida gives such complexity to its few characters that it is able to tell many stories and fully express that people can be both good and evil in a myriad of combinations. The film forces the viewer to judge the motivations of the characters through pure observation. We must rely on facial expressions, movements, and whispers instead of dialogue. Those who lived through the war staked their lives on fragmented information, and similarly Ida does not present the viewer with clarity about whom to trust, whom to hate, and whom to love.

Ida is an extraordinary film because of the realistic and understandable way it tells such a complex story. Condensing Polish memory of World War II into 82 minutes and making it accessible to audiences outside Poland is no small task. Every element of the film and every second of the screenplay further the impact of the story. The black and white color scheme, the stationary camera, and the two hairpins holding the wisps of Ida’s hair out of sight under her habit are all imbued with the same question. A question that Poland is still asking as we move into the 21st century: What happened here, and what does it mean for me?

Ida: Judge Not, Lest You Be Judged

Film review

Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida does not give watchers much in the way of viewing instructions.  The opening scenes offer no clues about the story, none of the familiar road signs at the beginning of historical films to frame the temporal setting.  (“Poland. 1962. A convent.”)  There is no music to set the tone, no shots panning over postwar Poland, nothing overtly telling viewers how to feel about the convent, the characters, the Communist government.  This lack of information is the film’s greatest strength.

The story takes place well after the establishment of Communist rule in Poland, with the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust silently, oppressively extant throughout everyday life.  Ida, the title character, is a young, novice nun.  The Mother Superior of the convent sends Ida to meet her estranged aunt and only living relative, Wanda.  When they first meet, Wanda informs Ida that she is really Jewish and her family was killed during the war.  Wanda takes Ida with her to find the graves of Ida’s parents and cousin, Wanda’s son.

The film offers no judgments about its main characters, who are polar opposites:  Wanda opinionated, outspoken, and unafraid to take what she wants, and Ida reserved, quiet, and chaste.  Pawlikowski does not push viewers to favor either woman, and both have less-than-upstanding moments.  In one scene, Wanda returns to Ida’s and her hotel room drunk.  She cannot help but taunt Ida for her discomfort with Wanda’s inebriation and reluctance to join the party downstairs:  “Of course.  I’m a slut and you’re a little saint.  This Jesus of yours adored people like me…”  But despite her mocking words, throughout the film Wanda’s excesses—drinking, one-night stands, breaking and entering—are framed in the context of her suffering.  A judge for the Communist government, at one point in the film she refers to herself as “Red Wanda,” proudly telling Ida about her days as a state prosecutor, having earned her nickname for the many people she had had executed.  Agata Kulesza beautifully portrays Wanda’s rage and hopelessness about her family’s violent deaths:  she is a woman on a mission to literally unearth the past.  Nothing will stop her.  If she is sometimes out-of-control, her anger and disillusionment help viewers understand why.

As for Ida, her reticence may primarily be a product of Agata Trzebuchowska’s inexperience (Ida was her acting debut), but the film still succeeds in portraying her discomfort with Wanda and her newfound family history.  In the hotel room, when inebriated Wanda picks up Ida’s Bible to “have a read,” Ida grabs the book out of Wanda’s hands, packs it away, and leaves the room, slamming the door behind her.  Wanda’s response:  “What a beast came out.”  The “beast” is Ida’s knee-jerk defense of her identity as a nun.  Wanda’s challenge reveals the shaky ground on which Ida’s faith is built.  Although Ida is committed to finding her parents’ grave, in a way Wanda threatens her sense of self.  It is only after Wanda’s suicide that Ida opens up to her aunt’s way of life.  She briefly imitates Wanda, putting on an evening dress and heels, getting drunk, and sleeping with a man.

The viewer’s experience is to be torn between the two women:  Ida, whose sheltered, Catholic upbringing makes the revelations about her family history particularly hard to process, and Wanda, who has both delivered harsh punishment and suffered horrific loss.  Both deserve better.

Even minor characters are presented without clear judgment.  Not even Feliks, the man who murdered Ida’s parents and cousin and the one character who probably most deserves our judgment, is presented as a clear-cut villain.  Toward the end of the film, having been continually harassed by Wanda, Feliks cuts a deal with Ida:  he will show Wanda and Ida their family’s burial site, if afterward they agree to leave him alone.  Feliks brings them to the woods, and digs up the bones of their family from an unmarked grave.  He admits to the murders with great regret.  He is shown sitting in the empty grave, with his knees tucked to his chest—almost in the fetal position—as if by digging the grave of his former neighbors, he has dug his own.  He is pitiable:  a Pole who killed his fellow Poles, who must live with his troubled history, just as Poland as a country must live with the memory of the Holocaust.  As with Ida and Wanda, viewers are left to make of Feliks what they will.

Pawlikowski’s sound and visual techniques also allow viewers to make their own judgments about the characters in Ida.  The film’s sound is almost exclusively diegetic:  footsteps, clucking chickens, scraping spoons.  The only music we hear is either produced by the characters or Wanda’s car radio.  Without external musical cues, viewers are free to decide for themselves what is really going on in each scene, and in the characters’ minds.  The fact that nearly all the action is framed in the bottom third of the screen makes every scene seem as if it is being perceived at eye-level.  This gives viewers a sense of being silent observers, drawing out their sympathy.  When Wanda crouches at her family’s grave, viewers feel as if they are physically beside her, watching her cradle her son’s skull in the crook of her arm, sharing in her grief.  This compression of the action in each shot also gives viewers a sense of incredible pressure on the characters:  a visual suggestion that at the time, Poland was being crushed by its silence about the Holocaust and the war.

Ultimately, the film’s lack of judgment is effective.  Ida achieves something many historical narratives do not:  it presents a story about horrific, suppressed trauma, and yet does not push viewers to accept a politicized message.  It is easy, especially in films about the Holocaust and the Second World War, to make monsters of those who committed atrocities.  It is difficult to confront their humanity.  Ida has no monsters.  It only has people trying to reconcile their mistakes and live with their choices.

Feliks

Ida: The Sound and The Silence

Film review

Ida, the 2013 Polish film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and the 2015 Academy Award winner for the Best Foreign Language Film, is stunning. Austere and minimal, the film is refreshingly simplistic. In a film with a notable absence of music and dialogue, the interplay of sound and silence provides an informative lens to consider the story.

Set in 1962 Poland, the film shows a country under Stalinist dictatorship just beginning to feel the reach of the West through the introduction of jazz. Poland lost a fifth of its population during WWII. Among the losses were three million Jews. A Communist takeover by the USSR and Red Army followed, leading to further loss. The viewers see a desolate country, which hints at the suffering and aftermath of Nazi occupation during WWII and Soviet rule in a process of recovery not yet complete. This isn’t explicitly expressed, but is felt in the heavy silence throughout the film. The lack of sound forces the viewer to visually focus on the film. The prevalence of silence highlights the importance of the few sounds the viewer hears.

Pawlikowski guides the viewer through Ida and Wanda’s journey with the efficient peppering of music throughout the film. Jazz is the mostly commonly played music form in the film. The viewers see people dancing in jazz clubs as a popular pastime and a sign of how Poland is westernizing. Lis, the handsome saxophone player the main characters, Ida and Wanda, meet on the road, embodies the free spirit of jazz. Jazz here is associated with improvisation and the free jazz of the 1960s in the US and other Western European countries. From the Polish perspective, jazz is unfettered by the past. But away from these pockets of freedom in the jazz clubs, other parts of the country still are shrouded in silence, such as the convent.

Ida plans to take her vows and devote herself to God. However, before doing so, she is instructed to seek out her only living relative, her aunt, Wanda Gruz. When she leaves the convent to go to the city and meet Wanda, she embarks on a journey to discover her own history. To start, she learns that she is actually a Jew born with the name Ida Lebenstein, while in the convent she is known as Anna. Wanda sardonically calls her a “Jewish nun.” There’s bitterness in her words as Ida was the one that escaped persecution during the war while Wanda had a different experience of immense loss. From that moment, their paths merge. They take a road trip to the village Wanda and Ida’s family lived in to find out more about the Lebensteins, which forces them to face the past. When they finally recover the bones of Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son and bury them in their Lublin family grave, the past is supposedly buried. However, the memory of the past persists, which leads Wanda to commit suicide as a result of losing faith and Ida to retreat back into the convent to protect her faith.

When Wanda prepares to commit suicide, Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, known as the Jupiter Symphony, plays in the background. At first, it almost seems like she is just preparing for a normal day until she disappears through the window. Viewers may feel disoriented by the unexpected action and jolted by the sudden blast of music after prolonged silence in the film. The aural reengagement with the film is jarring.

The Jupiter Symphony is Wanda’s motif. Like the song, Wanda is loud and bold. She appears in Ida’s life embodying a grand change and leaves just as suddenly. Viewers find out she chose not to raise Ida because of how much Ida reminded her of her dead sister. There are moments Wanda dotes on Ida and marvels at the resemblance, but grief overpowers her. Her affection for Ida stood no chance against Ida’s faith and conviction.

Ida’s return to the convent is set to Bach’s chorale prelude “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” represents her choice to choose the convent and God. The song name translates to “I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” Pure in style, it has been described as “a supplication in time of despair” by music critics. This could be how Ida feels after getting a taste of the outside world through her travels with Wanda and after Wanda’s death, trying on her clothes, habits, and sleeping with Lis. She experiences life as Wanda said she should, to know what she is sacrificing. She doesn’t choose Lis and the world because of its uncertainty. What Lis replies when she asks, “and then?” is unfamiliar. He says “life” but the only life she knows is the repetitive stability of the convent. However, she doesn’t return to the convent as the same person. Ida carries the memory of Wanda with her. She may be retreating back into her comfort zone, but there is a hint of confidence and drive that reminds the viewer of Wanda. The camera focuses on Ida’s face and movements in the last scene, whereas previously, she was more often depicted beside a larger and stronger presence – be it Wanda, nature or the city.

The interplay of silence and sound defines the film. Silence is the drone in the background, symbolizing a country still recovering from the past. Jazz, through Lis, is the sign of a new openness and westernization. In the same way, Mozart and Bach are classical music representations for Wanda and Ida, two people affected by a heavy past. The minimal but effective use of music further elevates an already cinematically artful film. I don’t know another film that uses this technique as efficiently as Ida does to tell a story, so listen closely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQvx6Gxgtp0

Vanishing Voices in Ida

Film review

Some things are too painful to talk about: the death of a child, losing one’s faith, the near-extermination of an entire race. Yet, the Polish 2015 Academy Award winning film Ida shares all of these stories—and more—and does so through subtle imagery and appeals to the viewer’s emotion. Following the story of a novice nun known as Anna, the film begins when the Mother Superior of Anna’s Order tells Anna that before she takes her vows she must visit her aunt. Ida tells the tale of Anna’s journey to meet her aunt, her discovery that she is not the Christian Anna but the Jewish Ida Lebenstein, and her realization that her family died in the Holocaust. In this film, stories are not told outright, but evoked through fragmented references and images that mirror the reality of Polish history: some things are better forgotten because they are too painful to remember.

As she embarks on her journey, Ida trades the routine of her convent for the wild world of her aunt and brings some of the quiet of the abbey to the bars and concert halls of Soviet-era Poland. With her hair covered, her eyes lowered, and her mouth often closed, Ida seems submissive but also gives the impression she’s listening for something unspoken. She asks questions when necessary to dig up her family’s history, but takes action in reverential silence. The decision to center a narrative about the unspoken truths of the Holocaust on a quiet, aspiring nun highlights the missing stories from this period of history. In a world that buzzes with the new sounds of jazz, Ida’s few, carefully-chosen words remind viewers of the voices that have been silenced.

Though nearly twenty years have passed since Ida’s family was killed, no one seems to know what happened to them. Ida turns first to her aunt Wanda, who then turns to the family that now inhabits the Lebensteins’ former home, but they can offer no answers. In the confusion and evasions that ensue, the film uncovers the shame still attached to Polish memory of World War II: the guilt of catholic Poles who turned against their neighbors and watched as Jews were “led to slaughter.” In a climactic graveyard scene, the man who has confessed to murdering Ida’s family digs up their bones.  His silent atonement becomes a moment of profound noise in the quiet of the Lebensteins’ unmarked grave.

In this silence of unspoken stories, the few words that hold true meaning stand out: names like Ida, Anna, and Lebenstein. Ida’s name almost vanished: her Jewish name gets exchanged for Anna at the orphanage because she can pass as a gentile with her red hair and fair skin. However, Ida’s name is not the only one missing in this film: there are no gravestones left to record the names of Ida’s family or Wanda’s son. Instead, Ida finds small relics—photographs and pieces of stained glass—that evoke the memory of her family. While visiting her family’s former home, Ida finds a stained glass window in the barn that reminds her of Wanda’s descriptions of her mother’s artwork. In the stained glass, Ida finds a small piece of her mother that has survived war and time. Similarly, during one night at Wanda’s home, Ida sorts through photographs as Wanda reminisces about their family. In these photographs, Ida discovers that she looks like her mother and that she was related to a little boy—a boy who she later discovers was her aunt’s son. Later, when Wanda tells Ida that her son was with Ida’s parents when they died, Ida’s childhood in the silence of the convent makes sense: she understands why her aunt could not raise a niece who would constantly remind her of her absent son.

Jews like Ida’s parents were often buried in unmarked graves during the Holocaust—their names erased and their memories nearly forgotten. This loss of Jewish life and memory portrayed in Ida reminded this reviewer of the Jewish history about which I had the chance to learn on a Holocaust education and service trip to Poland called “Together, Restoring their Names.” Watching as Ida and Wanda tried to put together the pieces of their family history into a coherent and memorable story, I could almost feel the drill I had used to break apart a schoolyard fence, part of infrastructure built by the Nazi regime during World War II.  The large stones I pulled from the wall were tombstones that the Nazis had appropriated from Jewish graves. As Ida touched her mother’s stained glass and Wanda retrieved her son’s bones, I remembered wrapping my hands around the piece of stone and turning it over to find a Hebrew inscription, a name. In order to find her mother and father, Wanda’s son, and so many other forgotten Jews, Ida slips into the silence of guilt and sadness to find missing names and relics. Names that you might find when returning a skull to its proper resting place or touching the bits of art that loved ones left behind. The ones of which it’s too difficult to speak, but that it might just be possible to touch and remember.

 

Ida: Simple Complexity

Film review

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.

The Art of Ida

Film review,

Ida is a visually stunning work of art. The 2013 Polish film (and winner of the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) about a young novice nun who discovers her family’s painful history is noticeably static, with much less dialogue than one might expect in a 21st-century film. At the beginning of the film the titular young heroine is referred to as Anna, but when she goes to meet her aunt before taking her vows she discovers that she was born Ida Lebenstein, a Jewish child who was saved due to her extremely young age and ability to pass as an ethnic Pole when her family was killed by their Christian neighbors.

Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski, the film’s cinematographers, and Paweł Pawlikowski, its director, clearly know their art; nearly every frame echoes back to another film, photograph, or painting. That doesn’t mean, however, that the creators of Ida suffer from a lack of originality or ingenuity. The cinematography here is full of references and homages, not shot-for-shot recreations—and this, one could argue, requires a truer and deeper understanding of the source material than a remake would. These visual echoes give the film a haunting emotional character. As viewers we can’t help but engage with the film. Even if we can’t remember exactly what the artistic references are, we’ve seen them before; there’s something uncanny and slightly discomforting about many of the film’s scenes, a sense that everything is familiar and yet not quite the same.

Many of the interior shots, filmed with a fixed camera, evoke Dutch genre and architectural paintings of the 17th century. When Ida is eavesdropping on her aunt threatening Feliks Skiba, the man who killed Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son, we don’t see everything that is happening, as a significant portion of the screen is filled by the doorframe and wall. It gives us the sense that Ida is seeing something she is not really meant to see and gives the shot a voyeuristic quality similar to what we find in Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter. In that painting a seated woman, holding a letter, looks up at her maidservant, who seems to be teasing her about its contents. In The Love Letter the viewer sees what is happening through a doorway; in fact, the viewer is looking out of what seems to be a closet or storage room, which adds to the aforementioned voyeuristic quality. Something similar happens in Ida. In one shot Wanda, framed by the doorway, sits and speaks to someone just out of frame. Here the viewer and Ida have the same perspective; they are observers, not participants. Neither understands yet why Wanda is being so harsh with the Skibas, as Feliks’ actions during the war have not yet been revealed. Both can see that Wanda is in pain, but neither has yet learned about her son.

Wanda

Left: still from Ida Right: "The Love Letter," Johannes Vermeer
Above: Film still from Ida
Below: “The Love Letter,” Johannes Vermeer, 1666

When Ida is speaking to the Mother Superior in the convent, the figures take up less than half of the frame. The remainder of the shot is taken up by a bookcase, whitewashed walls, and a short set of stairs leading to the doorway. Sunlight streaming through the window dwarfs the seated women. It looks like a painting by the 17th-century Dutch painter Emanuel de Witte, who was known for painting women in interior spaces. Many of his paintings have very little action; the visual interest and beauty of his paintings come from depicting light, shadow, texture, and space. We can see Żal and Lenczewski using the same concepts in the film. Viewers accustomed to color films might find black and white dull and uninteresting. Instead of being overwhelmed and distracted by color in Ida, however, the viewer notices seemingly minor details like the reflection in a window, flecks of paint peeling off a neglected wall, and the differences in the way light diffracts through glass, shines off metal, and dully glows off wood. It’s the polar opposite of the explosions and dramatic special effects we might see in, say, a Michael Bay movie.

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Above: Film still from Ida Below: "A Woman Peeling Apples," Pieter de Hooch
Above: Film still from Ida
Below: “A Woman Peeling Apples,” Pieter de Hooch, 1663

But why would a Polish cinematographer incorporate Dutch painting into his film? On the surface it seems nonsensical. Maybe, however, we should look at it as yet another example in the film of the pulls between East and West, communist and capitalist, that have defined so much of Poland’s recent past. Pawlikowski, Żal, and Lenczewski incorporate other references to this tension in Ida, most of which have an artistic bent. Wanda listens to music by Mozart, not the Soviet Union’s beloved Tchaikovsky. Government-approved music plays on the car radio, but the young people in the hotel play jazz. The Poland of Ida may politically lean towards the Soviet Union and the communist East, but its cultural heart seems to be pulling towards the West.

Someone once said to me that to see or even begin to understand the cinematography of a film you need to watch it over and over again.  However with Ida that approach is completely unnecessary. The cinematography is the main reason to see the film. I would go so far as to say that the cinematography IS the film. There are so many visual references to past works of art in this work, but they won’t be openly acknowledged; the viewer needs to discover them and interact with them personally. Is Ida the right choice for a fun Saturday movie night? I would say no. But it is a work of art in its own right, and is worth watching.

Ida: Stuck in Frame

Film review

The critically acclaimed film, Ida, is not for the faint of heart. Ida is the melancholic journey of a young Catholic novice, Anna, who learns not only that she is Jewish, but that her deceased family’s burial site is unknown. The film interconnects the protagonist’s plight with the barrenness of communist Poland in 1962 as it tries to move on from its recent past. The plot of Ida is chilling; moreover the stark black and white picture in conjunction with the static frame cinematography enhances the emotional impact of the piece. Ida is not entertainment; it is a profound film that artistically communicates the heartache of Poland’s past.

Ida is not a date night film –unless you would rather make the date even more uncomfortable. This incredibly powerful piece uses cinematographic techniques that alienate the average viewer. The film requires immense viewer patience and trust in the film’s gradual development in order to understand the trajectory of the story. In addition to this slow pace, the absence of extra-diegetic sound abandons viewers to the images they create in their own minds. The silence forces the viewer to retreat, wondering what the characters are thinking. It is lifelike. It is uncomfortable. There is no cue or background guidance to advise the viewer on the trajectory of the plot, how to feel, or what is coming.

The film begins with a close up of Anna in the bottom of the frame painting the face of their convent’s statue of Jesus. Her dark eyes penetrate through the screen of only black and white; her eyes command the attention of the viewer whenever present on screen. Agata Trzebuchowska portrays Anna, a very quiet and introspective religious young woman. Her introversion is felt not only through her lack of dialogue, but also by the absence of extra-diegetic sound. The scenes filmed in the convent are incredibly realistic; the only sounds are from direct actions on the screen or dialogue. The static frame of the camera makes the viewer feel as though they are watching, standing still beside the characters, hoping to not be in the way. This, in conjunction with the high resolution of the picture, is an overwhelming experience.

The film does an excellent job of featuring two very different women, Anna and Wanda. On the journey to learn about herself, Anna meets her aunt, Wanda. The Catholic Anna learns of her Jewish birth name, Ida. Wanda is someone who has been through tremendous loss, and has finally become someone in Poland, a judge, but merely for show trials. Wanda provides comic relief, but also juxtaposes Ida’s purity. Ida is a puzzle, quiet and reserved, giving very few clues as to who she is other than the facts that the viewers already know about her family. Ida has lived a protected life, ignorant of her past, in the safety of the convent. Her piousness is contrasted with Wanda’s wantonness—knowledge and experience have led Wanda to live her life as she does. Wanda was known as “Red Wanda” as a communist prosecutor and previous to her career as a judge she sent several anti-communist sympathizers to their death. She is a strong woman and stops at nothing to get what she wants. Wanda takes the lead to uncover more about Ida and their lost family by asking questions, unveiling deeper twists within the plot. In fact Wanda even goes to a dying man’s bedside in order to find the location of her family’s graves. She obeys the law as she sees fit and follows her own code of conduct.

Agata Kuleszca beautifully portrays Wanda, who introduces Ida to a new lifestyle. When Wanda is on screen, the viewer is surprised to suddenly hear music, as she puts a record on. When Wanda is around, the viewer is more comfortable: she creates a sense of familiarity in the cold scenes of Poland as they drive to find their family. Wanda brings humor and warmth to the frame. She smokes, she dances, she drinks; Wanda does what Wanda wants, because she has already paid the ultimate sacrifice: the loss of her family and child. As Ida gets to know her once estranged aunt, Ida and the audience gradually learn of the underlying grief that eventually consumes Wanda. It is clear that this energetic woman is the motivating force behind the camera angles, music, and plot. Wanda’s presence propels the story forward. Wanda is a commanding force on the screen; the viewer is blindsided by her suicide. In that scene, Wanda puts on the record player, leaving the music on in the background, and jumps out of the window, out of the screen.

Ida’s character growth is facilitated by the static camera angles, allowing the viewer to compare earlier scenes that previously took place and see the change in Ida. One of the most uncharacteristic moments is where the novice nuns are eating toward the end of the film: the quiet Ida giggles to herself, presumably reacting to a funny thought, shattering the tension of silence. This is contrasted with the earlier scene where there is complete silence in the dining room, other than the sound of the nuns eating and scraping their spoons against their bowls. This comparison of parallel scenes underscores the distance now between Ida and the other nuns. The first time Ida visits Wanda’s apartment she is uncomfortable and very still. When Ida arrives to mourn and take care of her Aunt’s belongings, her body language has changed –she smokes a cigarette and listens to jazz. Ida has taken on the provocative behavior of Wanda, exaggerated by the static camera angle.

Wanda’s quick departure leaves the film without a center. After Wanda’s death, the camera focuses on Ida. This change in perspective delivers the resolution to the story, in which Ida takes control of her own life. The camera follows her as she makes her own destiny, taking with her all that she has learned. After her stay in Wanda’s apartment, living a single night of debauchery, Ida puts her symbolic habit back on and walks back to the convent.

The ending of the film is unsatisfying; Ida takes a beautiful journey to intertwine the lives of Wanda and Ida, these incredibly complex characters, only to have one die and the other return to her solitude. After all of the experimental film techniques that displace the viewers from their comfort, there is no resolution. Not unlike the unnecessary brutality of World War Two, the ending of Ida makes the film feel pointless.

 

Finding Family: Ida

Film review

It takes fewer than 82 minutes watching Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida to travel back in time to 1962 Soviet-era Poland. Although Pawlikowski’s film is set in a world different from that of today, one of its marvels is its accessibility. He opens up the film through the themes of family and identity, making Ida relatable and relevant to a 21st-century audience.

In the beginning of the film, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a young nun about to take her vows, is told by her Mother Superior that she must first visit her only living relative. Anna, having been orphaned and raised at the convent, does not appear eager to meet her aunt and experience life outside the convent, perhaps thinking nothing will affect her decision to take her vows. Nonetheless, Anna ventures into the city.

When Anna meets her aunt, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza), her world, as she knows it, shatters. She learns intricacies of her family history that, one would think, would fundamentally alter the course of her life. Her name is not actually Anna, but Ida Lebenstein. Somewhat less surprising after the first piece of news, Wanda tells her rather frankly, “You’re a Jew.” Wanda draws attention to Ida’s red hair as a marker of her origins, recognizing her at the door before she even enters the apartment. (That detail of this black-and-white film is lost on the viewer, as everything appears in grayscale.) What follows is Ida’s journey to reconcile her own history with that of her family in ways that surprise and please the viewer.

Wanda tries to convince Ida that in order to take her vows and mean them, she must first know what it is that she is sacrificing. Wanda’s lifestyle of drinking, smoking and one-night stands is a stark contrast to Ida’s life of discipline, sacrifice and religion. Their interactions with Lis (Dawid Ogrodnik), the hitchhiker that Wanda picks up further exemplify the contrast between the two women’s life philosophies. Wanda’s attempts to get Ida interested in Lis are met with resistance.

Contrasts and parallels between Ida and Wanda drive the film. Wanda is a judge, who as Red Wanda represented the Soviet law, displaying her strong will by sending fellow Poles to their death. Ida, on the other hand, leads her life according to faith and is at times rather demure. There are revealing moments when Wanda offers Ida a donut or a cigarette, Ida declines and Wanda proceeds to enjoy the sinful treat, further highlighting the contrast between the two women. Ida and Wanda set out to understand what happened to their family during the German occupation of World War II and find the bodies of their family. Once they find the house that once belonged to the Lebensteins, they encounter a Polish family who live there: Feliks Skiba and his wife and children. Wanda knows that Feliks is the key to finding out what happened, as he and his father were there. During interactions with Feliks and his father, the viewer sees the strength of Wanda’s character contrasted with Ida’s timidity.

In a chilling scene, Feliks takes Ida and Wanda into the woods and digs up bones that he says belonged to their family. He gives them the bones, allowing Wanda and Ida to take them to their family burial plot in an overgrown Jewish cemetery in Lublin. After the burial, it seems that the goal of their road adventure has been met and Ida and Wanda part ways. In attempts to return to normalcy, Ida tries to re-devote herself to life at the convent, while Wanda numbs herself with alcohol. Wanda, perhaps unable to cope with the death and burial of her son, or perhaps unsatisfied with her life, jumps out of her apartment window to her death. It is not until Wanda’s funeral that Ida encounters Lis again. In a scene in which Ida sheds her habit and dons Wanda’s dress and shoes, she tries smoking and drinking and goes to see Lis. Continuing her trial of Wanda’s former life, Ida sleeps with Lis. In bed, the two have a conversation about the future—after a series of “and then what’s” from Ida, Lis finally replies, “it’s life.” Ida, unsatisfied with that answer, perhaps bored by the idea of a dog and family and the life she would lead outside the convent, leaves Lis and does not turn back. She shows the same determination and strength of character in her decision, as Wanda would have, albeit their conclusions differed dramatically.

Ida and Wanda are both tested throughout their adventure and exploration into their family history. Their relationships to their faiths are perhaps the greatest difference between Ida and Wanda. For Ida, Catholicism reigns supreme—experiences in the outside world do not shake her devotion to the convent and her life there. In an interview, Pawlikowski described Ida as “psychologically and sociologically totally unusual—she’s a woman of God.” Her faith is inherently part of her personhood, unshakable. Wanda, on the other hand, who once held faith in the Soviet government, does not share Ida’s strength of devotion. Wanda’s faith twists throughout the film and by the end, she loses what little hold of it she had left and kills herself in a moment of internal struggle.

Through his characters, Pawlikowski successfully makes the Polish language accessible, to the point where at times the viewer forgets about the subtitles. Ida gives an inside look at post-German occupation Poland, showing the scars and healing along the way. While perhaps not ideal for a light-hearted movie night, Ida’s fresh exposition of the often-told story of the Jews during World War II from a new and engrossing angle is certainly worth a watch.