Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida raises several questions and offers few answers, frustrating any attempts to find closure at the end of the film.
Set in post-World War II Poland, the film follows the journey of a young woman who strives to learn about the life and death of her parents. After her parents’ death, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is raised in a convent to become a nun. However, before taking her vows, the mother superior decides that Anna should meet her only living relative, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza). She sets off across Poland to meet her aunt, only to discover that her entire life has been a lie. Her name is not Anna; it’s Ida Lebenstein. She is the orphaned child of a Jewish couple killed during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Wanda and Ida travel across the country to learn about the true fate of Ida’s parents.
Ida and Wanda are polar opposites. Wanda has several strings of one night stands (including one man who is there the day Ida arrives), drinks too much, and smokes constantly, all to numb her guilt over the role she played in the communist resistance during the occupation and the death of her infant son during the Holocaust. Ida, on the other hand, is rarely seen without her nun’s habit. She denies having any sexually impure thoughts and doesn’t drink or smoke. For much of her life, Ida’s world has been constricted by the walls of her convent. Unlike Wanda, Ida has never lived through war; she is innocent and naive. While their stark differences could easily paint one character as a “sinner” and the other as a “saint,” both defy overly-simplistic categorizations.
The film dances around the most interesting issues and subplots, leaving much of the film’s potential untapped. Though Ida and Wanda spend the bulk of the film searching for answers about the death of Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son, the film never tells the audience what happened. We learn that while staying with the Skiba family to evade capture, the Leibensteins were lured into the woods and murdered by the son, Feliks Skiba. It is unclear why he did it. Did he kill them in order to protect his own family and avoid a legal dispute? Was he anti-Semitic? The audience is given no resolution.
It’s possible that the uncertainty surrounding the Lebensteins’ death – at least, for Wanda and Ida – might be reflective of the time. There are millions of people for whom the exact details of their deaths during the Holocaust will forever be unknown. For the surviving immediate family members, it’s possible that knowing the truth wouldn’t provide closure at all. While the film stubbornly refuses to offer audience members any sense of closure, perhaps that’s a parallel to life, where oftentimes questions have no answer and sometimes tragedy strikes in a way that can only be described as inexplicable.
Other instances of vagueness and ambiguity in the film are not as easily rationalized. Throughout the course of the film, I found myself asking one question in particular: though Ida was raised Catholic, should she continue to practice Catholicism given the fact that her parents and millions of her people were killed in a mass genocide because they were Jewish? The film has the potential to broach this topic, but never does. We learn towards the end of the film that Ida was only able to survive the war because she passed for Anglo-Saxon even as an infant. In a twisted way, Ida was able to evade persecution as a Jew by assimilating into the dominant culture through Catholicism. While we see Ida eventually begin to question her interpretation of Christianity, it’s unclear if she ever becomes curious about Judaism. The possibility of Ida exploring Jewish culture, which she could participate in without converting to Judaism, is also never explored. I find it strange that in this coming-of-age film the protagonist expresses no curiosity toward the religion and culture faced with such persecution that it lead to her parents’ death.
The ending of the film itself is yet another mystery. The audience sees Anna dressed in her habit, walking along the road wearing a confident expression after her one night stand with Lis. While it’s tempting for audience members to interpret this as Anna returning to the convent, is that truly the case? In the other scenes involving travel to and from the convent, the audience can clearly see buses. In that case, why is Anna walking at the end of the film? Does the look of conviction across her face refer to her decision to return to the convent or her decision not to return?
Ultimately, the film Ida is widely praised because it contains many of the elements consistent with good stories: dynamic characters, an engaging plot, a deep history. However, the film refuses to delve deeply into its most engaging issues and ignores opportunities for character development. Because of this, many audience members will finish the film with a sense of deep dissatisfaction, wondering to themselves, “Is that it?”