Tag Archives: by Sammy Marrus

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.

The Protest for All, but Not Me

Feature article

“The French are a people who protest. All you need for a French protest is people. Maybe you take some cobblestones from the streets to throw. Maybe you flip over cars and light them on fire.” I remembered these words of one of my former French teachers. They conjure up a very stereotypical image of protest, like the student uprisings of 1968. I thought today it would look different, but I could not guess how. I’d been living in Paris for weeks before I saw any semblance of a protest. Burning cars would have been exciting.

It was a Sunday. I was returning from Charles de Gaulle with my roommate when we emerged from the metro station, near our apartment in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, to the sound of rhythmic, almost militaristic chanting. I could not yet make out the words or understand what the crowd was saying. I was nervous and were it not for Katie, I probably would have gotten back on the metro and gone to one of my friends’ houses to figure out what was going on. Katie, more adventurous, pulled me onward and upward to the street.

“The government is threatening the future of France,” some shouted. “The family is at risk,” yelled others. Thousands of protesters were chanting. Pink banners, balloons and signs depicting an iconic family—a mother, father, daughter and son—spread like a sea across Boulevard des Invalides, reaching around the corner and as far down as the Seine. Our apartment was just two blocks from the Saint François-Xavier metro stop, but there were so many people that I could barely see one block ahead. Protesters of all ages were dressed in baby pinks and blues. I noticed that the banners, pickets, stickers and t-shirts all said La Manif Pour Tous. At least I now knew what the protest was. Or did I? I had so many questions: what did “manif” mean? Why was the family at risk? Did this have to do with some form of birth control I’d never heard of? I wanted answers, but Katie was intent on weaving through the crowd and participating, despite having no idea what it was that we were protesting for or against. Instead of making a beeline for home, we decided to try to blend in with the crowd.

I checked my phone to see if I could glean any information online, but there were so many people that my cell phone was too slow to connect to the internet or let me ask Siri. I shoved it back into my pocket and kept moving forward, so as not to get trampled. We joined the mass walking towards Les Invalides and the Seine beyond. Somewhere along the way we found ourselves holding bright pink signs with the same family logo. I quickly got rid of mine, still unsure what it meant. Nearly an hour later we had barely made it the half-mile from the metro to the Seine when we saw that the protest was rounding the corner and heading southeast towards the National Assembly. Katie and I agreed that was our cue to turn around. Easier said than done. We did not stand a chance swimming upstream in a crowd of that size; it really did feel like tout le monde was there. Instead, we drifted to the side and walked along the river until we had passed the sea of protesters and could make a left towards our apartment.

Once I got inside, a quick search told me two things. First, that La Manif Pour Tous or The Protest for All is a group that began contesting same-sex marriage laws when they were first proposed before the Senate and the National Assembly in 2012. The group’s name is an ironic reappropriation of the movement associated with that law; Le Mariage Pour Tous became La Manif (short for the French word for protest, manifestation, I was happy to learn) Pour Tous. Unlike the law to legalize same-sex marriage, this protest group was really not pour tous at all. La Manif Pour Tous lost its initial battle soon thereafter, in 2013, when the French government passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage. That did not dissuade them, though; since then, La Manif Pour Tous has refocused on “protecting” the family in response to legislation that would help same-sex or queer couples adopt children and form families of their own.

I also learned that La Manif Pour Tous is often compared to the Tea Party movement in the United States in that it too is considered an extremely conservative perspective on certain issues. What did I get myself into, I wondered. I read on. Those who support La Manif Pour Tous are less concerned with defending marriage as an institution exclusively between a man and a woman than they are about ensuring that queer couples not have children. As an extension of this, La Manif Pour Tous supports creating and maintaining barriers to prevent queer couples from adopting or finding surrogates. French adoption agencies often require couples to have been married or live together for at least two years, making it virtually impossible for single individuals to adopt. Further, surrogacy is illegal in France, so people are already forced to seek out other options abroad. These barriers date back to the Napoleonic civil code of France that considers adoption to be the right of a married couple. Some argue that La Manif Pour Tous is trying to ensure that every child has a mother and a father. Others argue that it is homophobic. This it certainly is.

I called Katie into my room to tell her what I’d just learned. We stared at each other for a few seconds, in shock at our ignorance, unable to find words. Even though we had participated in a protest neither of us believed in and never would have joined if we had known what the protesters stood for, we had a better understanding of the importance that the French assign to protest as a form of active citizenship and as a forum to voice their opinions. Katie shuddered at the thought of telling her friends at home what had happened. Even though she goes to school in conservative Virginia, the protest we had just participated in was on a wholly different level. Neither of us had expected to see this protest in France, especially not in Paris, a place we both idealized as liberal. Then we laughed because as we had just learned in class, in the mid-19th century under Napoleon III, the Prefect of Paris Georges-Eugène Haussmann redesigned the city, leveling the labyrinthine medieval streets in favor of wide boulevards. This design was in part to make it difficult for protesters and rioters to take control of parts of the city as they had done in the past. Clearly, this had not stopped the French from protesting. Rather, as I looked out at the sea of protesters from the window, it seemed that the boulevards only gave them more space to fill. Not a problem for the tous of this particular manif on that Sunday in Paris.

Photo courtesy of: http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2013/04/25/manif-pour-tous-une-chanson-techno_n_3153093.html La Manif Pour Tous protest on the esplanade des Invalides
La Manif Pour Tous protest on the esplanade des Invalides  [http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2013/04/25/manif-pour-tous-une-chanson-techno_n_3153093.html]
For more: http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr
For more: http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr

 

 

Tube Meats

Blog Post

I never thought I would need to say the phrase “I don’t eat tube meats because I had a bad experience the last time I ate them,” in French. Random? Certainly. Important? Absolutely. I sat in a warm, breezy, sunny backyard garden face to face with Annick, my host mother, whom I had met less than an hour before, wishing more than anything that I knew how to say that one phrase.

A lot had happened in that hour – I arrived in Tours, gathered my bag from the bus and stood waiting to be paired with a roommate for the homestay. The director of my program, Lucy, took me aside after everyone had been paired off and told me that because of an issue with her visa, my roommate couldn’t make it to France. I must have looked panicked to be alone because she offered to host me herself instead of giving me a host family. No, I thought, I did not travel to France to stay with an American woman.

Annick picked me up about ten minutes later. She zipped up in her very European, very compact car, parking half on the sidewalk of the narrow street—a spot I had not thought existed. Our introductions, facilitated by Lucy, were not as awkward as I had expected. Despite my jetlag, not half-bad French flowed from my mouth as I briefly explained my background. Not off to a bad start, I thought, despite being alone.

In the car, Annick asked me to confirm that I was in fact allergic to eggplant as my information sheet said. She then asked if I had any other dietary restrictions – mainly if I was okay with fish. Yes, I said, I love fish and no, there was nothing else to note that came quickly to my jetlagged, confused and overwhelmed mind.

We arrived at her house; she showed me my bedroom and bathroom and left me to unpack while she fixed our dinner in the kitchen. I found my way downstairs and outside to Annick’s impressively tended garden and took the seat across from the one with a full wine glass. I was not sure of the time. Was it dinnertime? I was more tired than anything, but I figured I should eat.

I was watching one of Annick’s cats play in the flowerbeds as Annick appeared at the door, explaining how happy she was to have an American homestay student. She recalled the nationalities of her past students—I think the tally was five Brits and six other Europeans. I did not know what to say to this so I just smiled. I offered to help carry some plates but she said no, so I just sat at the table as she brought each plate out. The first, pieces of baguette. The second, sliced tomatoes that she explained were from her garden and some lettuce as well. On her third trip, Annick emerged holding a bottle of white wine and a half-drunk glass that I realized was hers as she handed the full one to me. Whoops, I thought, I guess I sat in the wrong place. Everything was feeling very French, very fresh and local, down to the Sancerre that was made less than 100 miles from where we sat.

Some baguette with tomatoes seemed like the perfect dinner for my travel-twisted stomach. She sat down, cut the baguette and handed me a piece that was sliced horizontally as if to make a sandwich. A ringing came from the kitchen and she got up again and returned with a plate holding three…were they hot dogs…oh no. I froze. Whatever it was, it was certainly tube meat. I did not know what to say or do. I took my time lining my baguette with slices of tomatoes so that I could watch what she did. She put one of the tube meats into her baguette, folded it and bit it as if it were a hotdog at Fenway Park. She then looked to me for confirmation that she had done it correctly. An American meal with a French twist, she explained, beaming. I couldn’t tell her. I wondered how inappropriate would it be to explain to this stranger that the last time I ate a hotdog I was in first grade and vomited all over the place and that I hadn’t gone near one since… Here goes nothing, I thought, as I loaded one onto my baguette. No no, she said, there were two for me.

 

A corner of Annick’s garden.