Category Archives: Film Review: “Ida” (2014)

A review of the 2014 Polish film “Ida”

Less is More

Film Review: "Ida" (2014)

The 2013 Polish film Ida, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and set in 1962, is both a coming-of-age story and a retrospective look at Poland’s complicated history.  The main character, Anna, is an adolescent girl about to take her vows to become a nun.  She is sent to visit her only living relative, Aunt Wanda, before committing to life at the convent.  Almost immediately we learn that Anna is Jewish and that her given name is actually Ida.  From Wanda’s home she and Ida, strangers to each other, travel together across the Polish countryside to unravel their shared past.  The story includes moments of anti-Semitism and weaves together the historical consequences of both Nazi and Soviet rule.  These larger themes are present throughout all aspects of the story, but for most of the film they take a back seat to the emotional transformation of the characters.  The film is a study of subtlety, in overall message as well as in its visual and auditory effects.

Ida and Wanda go back to the family farm to discover what happened to Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son.  Once there, they meet the farm’s current tenant, Feliks.  Wanda tries but is unable to obtain any specific information about why her sister died and where the family was laid to rest.  It becomes clear that while Ida is piecing together her identity by learning about a family she never knew she had, Wanda is seeking closure by learning about the family she lost.  As the two women travel on, they meet Lis, a young musician who takes a liking to Ida; his presence magnifies the differences between them.  Ida is constrained by her reticent personality and the routines she practiced while at the convent.  Her steadiness and rigidity is offset by Wanda’s recklessness, emotional transparency, and copious drinking.  Agata Kulesza, who plays Wanda, portrays strength and vulnerability from one shot to the next, from threatening police officers and verbally assaulting Feliks to lying naked in bed after a night of drinking and meaningless sex.  Wanda is free in many ways that Ida is not and yet unlike Ida, is weighed down by her past, specifically the death of her son and sister.  The director does not need to include inner monologues or flashbacks to explain the characters, but allows the audience to read between the lines.

After discovering that it was Feliks who murdered Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son, but who spared Ida because she could pass as a non-Jew, the two women retrieve their relatives’ remains and take them to a family burial plot.  At this point the two women come together in mourning.  After paying their respects the two women part ways; they go back to their respective homes and attempt to readjust to their former lives.  Wanda fails to achieve closure and ends up committing suicide.  Ida likewise cannot go back to her old life; having experienced the outside world she finds the routines of the convent ludicrous rather than reassuring.  She postpones taking her vows and once again leaves the convent, this time to go to Wanda’s funeral.  In Wanda’s home, Ida tries drinking, smoking, and dressing up for the first time.  She even sleeps with Lis.  Her actions pay tribute to her aunt’s lifestyle and show that she is interested in sampling a different life.  The symbolic weight of these mundane activities show once again how the film is capable of speaking volumes with simple scenes.

The entire film, shot in black and white, gives a melancholy feel and invites the viewer to take on a meditative state.  The absence of color reflects Ida’s simple lifestyle in the convent and the bleak political climate. The somber mood is made clear by the large sections of film with no dialogue.  Ida communicates largely through her dark expressive eyes and spends most of the film silently absorbing information and experience.   Although this could make Ida seem naïve, the actress, Agata Trzebuchowska, successfully appears reserved, making Ida’s character more nuanced.  The choice to minimize stimuli makes every instance of dialogue and every visual cue more poignant.  It allows the film to strike a careful balance between subtle changes and raw emotion.  Even though the material in the film is dark and heavy, nothing the characters do is overwrought.

This minimalist style holds true for plot.  The film lacks explicit explanations.  Instead, the director opts for understatements.  Any triggering action in the film, whether it be suicide, murder, or sex,  is alleviated by music and the absence of explicit visuals.  Instead of an action-packed film the director chooses to focus on introspection.  The shot of Feliks in the grave of those he killed, face in hands, is more powerful than any words. Even in this moment of revelation the film fails to explain every detail, instead focusing on the mood.  Why exactly Feliks kills Ida’s parents is unclear: was it to take over the farm or for fear that the Nazis would discover and punish his father’s actions?  This and other ambiguities make the film more powerful.  The narrative is more realistic in that it lacks tidy resolutions.  After a night of living like Wanda, Ida gets up and leaves Lis, still asleep in her aunt’s bed.  As she walks away from Lis, and any future she might have had with him, she also walks away from Wanda and rejects the kind of life her aunt led.  Ida dons her habit and walks towards the unknown along a plain dirt road.  Ida is, in many ways, just as alone at the end as when the film began but with many more lived experiences.  This final shot captures the disillusion of post-war Poland and the uncertainties faced by its people: life goes on no matter what.

 

 

The Saint and the Sinner

Film Review: "Ida" (2014)

Ida, released in 2013, is a black and white film about self-discovery, betrayal and family set against a backdrop of 1960s Poland. At the time, the landscape of the country was grim, suffering from economic downturn and failure to recover after the world war. The film follows the journey of Ida and her aunt, Wanda. The two are brought together for the first time after the convent that raised the orphaned Ida urges her to visit Wanda, her only living relative. They embark on a mission to uncover the truth behind Ida’s parents’ death. Her father was Jewish and had been slaughtered with his wife and nephew, whom we later discover to be Wanda’s son, by their neighbor. Their killer believed Ida could pass as a non-Jew and left her with the priest of the local chapel.

Days away from completing her vows to become a nun, Ida, paired with her secular, promiscuous aunt, discovers life outside of the convent: smoking, drinking and jazz. As she and her aunt get closer to finding the burial site of their family, Ida starts exploring herself and her femininity by looking at herself in the mirror or bringing her beautiful hair out from under her nun’s veil and chatting with a young saxophone player. These small moments of temptation create doubt in Ida’s mind as to whether or not she is prepared to fully commit herself to a life as a nun.

Throughout the film, we see elements of the western world, suggesting that even through the Cold War era, the progress of the West has rippled through to Eastern Europe: a “Bar” sign in a small village, and the most prominent feature throughout the film, American jazz.

The common thread is music. In fact, the film is defined by it. Sometimes the tempo is fast and lighthearted, in scenes such as the evenings attended by Wanda and Ida in the hotel’s basement. Other times its tone is melancholic and grey.

There are also scenes in which the camera does not follow whatever character it is focused on, and as this person exits the shot there are some seconds of suspense in which our focus is fixed on inanimate objects rather than the living, breathing characters.

Towards the end of the film, Wanda is overcome by sorrow: the son of the neighbor who killed their family has shown them where he buried their relatives. Here Wanda finds the bones of her infant son – she had left him in the care of her sister, and had joined the resistance against Germany. Her choice had taken her son from her, but it also allowed her to become a state prosecutor, and ultimately a judge; it had turned her into an essential “comrade” of the new Polish order, and had given her status. However, this does not seem to give Wanda strength. On the contrary, it eats at her, as though it were all for nothing. She refers almost sarcastically to the other Poles she’s sentenced to death in her position of power, as though the words should carry an important weight. Instead all they do is make her feel cowardly, like a traitor.

Felix, the man who murdered her son, is also overwhelmed. In the small ditch he’d dug to bury the family, he crouches down in pain, succumbing to the guilt he feels over his past actions.

Once Ida leaves her to return to the convent, we see Wanda spiraling into despair by drinking more, smoking more and bringing more men home with her.

Just as her son’s murderer is desperate after years of carrying the weight of his past actions, Wanda enters a state that is increasingly similar to Felix’s. Their despair is reflective of the Polish times the film is set in: after a temporary surge of success that brought them a new regime and new hope after the tragedies of WWII, the country had fallen into a dark pattern that no false hope could alter. Wanda had fought for a better Poland, now she was merely a tool of the Communist regime. Her ideals were shattered: she’d given up her child for nothing and was left feeling empty and desperate.

At the peak of her sadness, Wanda plays one of her Mozart symphonies where the tempo is fast and loud. She goes about in regular routine, smoking a cigarette, opening her window, putting on her coat as if ready to go out. Then, with chilling speed, she walks up to the open window, steps onto the ledge, and jumps out. The scene happens so quickly, paired with the liveliness of the music playing in the background and the nonchalance with which Wanda steps off the ledge, that it is shocking to the viewer like a sudden electric shock from a loose wire.

After separating from her aunt, Ida shows increasing signs of doubt in her commitment to her faith. She begins giggling in the middle of a meal, a traditionally silent affair, and stares ambiguously at another nun that is bathing in front of her, leading us to believe she is, as Wanda put it, having “sinful thoughts.” This climaxes in her confessing to a statue of Jesus that she is not ready and asking for forgiveness. By the time she returns to the city, her aunt is already gone.

Ida moves into Wanda’s now vacant apartment, and simultaneously inhabits the space as well as the identity of her aunt: she puts on her aunt’s clothes, tries a cigarette, consumes a bottle of vodka. At her aunt’s funeral, she is reunited with the charming saxophone player she had met on her travels with Wanda. After meeting him at one of his gigs, they return to Wanda’s apartment, and spend the night together.

The abrupt change in Ida’s character seems to signify her haste in cutting ties with the life she had always known, of chastity and devotion to God. It seems as though she is on the verge of changing for good – that she will follow her new romantic partner to the seaside where he is scheduled to play with his band, and as he suggests, get married and start a life together.

It seems as though the “happily ever after” we are promised in most modern-day cinema is nearing. Instead, just as quickly and harshly as Wanda took her life, Ida changes her own narrative in a completely unexpected way: as morning comes, the young girl retrieves her convent clothes, retires her hair once again to her veil, and quietly slips out of her late aunt’s apartment, leaving behind her lover and the life they could have had together.

Some may interpret this ending as a sad one, as though we have been cheated of the romantic ending we were expecting. In truth, the ending reflects a great deal of what we have seen throughout the movie: the dynamic between a saintly, quiet girl, and a woman wrecked by loss. Ida chooses solitude and salvation: she chooses her loyalty to her family at the convent, the ones that had raised her, rather than following in the footsteps of her bereaved aunt.

There is power in this ending. It almost seems as though she is moving toward a life that serves a greater purpose than serving as a man’s wife, a mother to his children. Instead she chooses to serve her creator, what she believes to be the most powerful thing in existence.

The final shot, in which Ida walks steadfast, almost defiantly down the dirt road, with clear conviction in her eyes, shatters the bleak trends of the movie so far. It makes one feel as though there is hope for the young girl, and by association hope for Poland. There is nothing beautiful, or romantic, about the state Poland found itself in at the time. However, Ida is a small ray of light in an otherwise grey landscape, a woman who chooses the greatness of the unknown over the safe promise of a domestic life.

Unanswered Questions: A Review of the Film Ida

Film Review: "Ida" (2014)

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?”