Humanity is meted out in Ida, as if hope and happiness were going out of stock. Shot in standard—four-by-thee—ratio, and black-and-white, Paweł Pawlikowski's film resembles the behind-the-wall hits of the era in which it is set, such as Miloš Forman's Czech tragicomedy Loves of a Blonde (1965). But a style which once implied alacrity is, in Ida, painstakingly composed, with subjects trapped by staircases and power lines, stark contrasts and infinite sky, snow blowing nowhere. The muted expressions, which glaze the women's faces and have few rest stops on the road from numbness to suffering, are circumscribed by the limits of one character's experiences and the other's expectations. It's like Melancholia externalized: an everyday, institutional apocalypse.
Ida makes one feel cloistered; it begins, fittingly, at an abbey, where Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is on the verge of taking her vows. Before this happens, the novitiate is instructed to visit with her only living relative, an aunt named Wanda (Agata Kulesza), who she has never met. (Anna had been deposited at the convent as a baby.) Wanda, whose apartment is luxurious by Lodz standards, goes through cigarettes and assignations on an assembly line, and greases the gears with booze; she has the worn, black pout of Jeanne Moreau. When she informs Anna that she's a "Jewish nun," the revelation is loaded like a black joke or insult. To Anna, it's a non sequitur. Shown no more hospitality than a photograph of her dead mother, and neither expecting nor feeling entitled to more, she is back at the bus station that afternoon—until Wanda relents. They embark for the provinces to find where Anna's parents were buried during the Nazi occupation.
These stories of Jews hidden, and ultimately betrayed, under the gun, by their Christian neighbors—the only American variant that comes to mind is Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated—are rarely told from a Gentile perspective; but, seen through the prism of a "Jewish nun," who is learning to react to external stimuli as a toddler, innately resigned to Original Sin, might, Ida has a freshness worthy of Pawlikowski's aestheticized asceticism. I wasn't thrilled with the disjuncture between the glacially paced, high-art cinematography and the glacial, dismal settings at first; the implication seemed to be that direct emotion would be too vulgar. But this is a story, essentially, of aftermath: told after the action has happened and history had been set. This device gives the viewer unusually broad license to scrutinize each frame; it's like looking at beautiful portraits in a gallery that don't catch or create a moment in time but digest it. The two women are subtle examinations of "earth" and "grace"; but unlike Malick in The Tree of Life, Pawlikowski makes them flesh—lets them be flesh. In Wanda's case, waxing flesh, sweating like a candle melting to the nub. A magistrate, she was called "Red Wanda" in the early '50s because of her zealous prosecution—and execution—of enemies of the state. She gives the lie to the Soviet bureaucracy; public policy has absorbed her private thirst for vengeance, which neither blood nor vodka can sanctify.
Trzebuchowska gives Anna a rich but tentative smile; she's still practicing. Her hair is strawberry blonde, even when it's hidden in its habit—and in black-and-white. Going a little overboard, perhaps, Pawlikowski poses her like the Girl with the Pearl Earring; she's a Mona Lisa except when she smiles. Not to undersell Kulesza's performance, which combines invective and abandon and turns them into a verb, or to reduce the movie to the suspense of its narrative—but what suspense there is (which goes well beyond this fragile story) is pegged on Trzebuchowska. Wanda is past saving. The conflict—which, to the credit of the director and his co-writer, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is not resolved—is what it would mean to be saved, if deliverance is even a possibility in this atmosphere without hope. By the end, the editing is basic, verging on primitive: Anna is confronted with her vows, falls for an itinerant jazz musician who looks like Andrew Garfield, and the concatenated plot clicks forward like stills in a photo essay. Anna's waffling has to do with more than capitalism versus communism, materialism versus spirituality; it has something to do with the legacy of those relatives who were murdered when the world was on its head and knees. The transition from Nazism to Stalinism hasn't been a progression. Somehow, someway Anna has to cut against that grain.
Ida makes one feel cloistered; it begins, fittingly, at an abbey, where Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is on the verge of taking her vows. Before this happens, the novitiate is instructed to visit with her only living relative, an aunt named Wanda (Agata Kulesza), who she has never met. (Anna had been deposited at the convent as a baby.) Wanda, whose apartment is luxurious by Lodz standards, goes through cigarettes and assignations on an assembly line, and greases the gears with booze; she has the worn, black pout of Jeanne Moreau. When she informs Anna that she's a "Jewish nun," the revelation is loaded like a black joke or insult. To Anna, it's a non sequitur. Shown no more hospitality than a photograph of her dead mother, and neither expecting nor feeling entitled to more, she is back at the bus station that afternoon—until Wanda relents. They embark for the provinces to find where Anna's parents were buried during the Nazi occupation.
These stories of Jews hidden, and ultimately betrayed, under the gun, by their Christian neighbors—the only American variant that comes to mind is Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated—are rarely told from a Gentile perspective; but, seen through the prism of a "Jewish nun," who is learning to react to external stimuli as a toddler, innately resigned to Original Sin, might, Ida has a freshness worthy of Pawlikowski's aestheticized asceticism. I wasn't thrilled with the disjuncture between the glacially paced, high-art cinematography and the glacial, dismal settings at first; the implication seemed to be that direct emotion would be too vulgar. But this is a story, essentially, of aftermath: told after the action has happened and history had been set. This device gives the viewer unusually broad license to scrutinize each frame; it's like looking at beautiful portraits in a gallery that don't catch or create a moment in time but digest it. The two women are subtle examinations of "earth" and "grace"; but unlike Malick in The Tree of Life, Pawlikowski makes them flesh—lets them be flesh. In Wanda's case, waxing flesh, sweating like a candle melting to the nub. A magistrate, she was called "Red Wanda" in the early '50s because of her zealous prosecution—and execution—of enemies of the state. She gives the lie to the Soviet bureaucracy; public policy has absorbed her private thirst for vengeance, which neither blood nor vodka can sanctify.
Trzebuchowska gives Anna a rich but tentative smile; she's still practicing. Her hair is strawberry blonde, even when it's hidden in its habit—and in black-and-white. Going a little overboard, perhaps, Pawlikowski poses her like the Girl with the Pearl Earring; she's a Mona Lisa except when she smiles. Not to undersell Kulesza's performance, which combines invective and abandon and turns them into a verb, or to reduce the movie to the suspense of its narrative—but what suspense there is (which goes well beyond this fragile story) is pegged on Trzebuchowska. Wanda is past saving. The conflict—which, to the credit of the director and his co-writer, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is not resolved—is what it would mean to be saved, if deliverance is even a possibility in this atmosphere without hope. By the end, the editing is basic, verging on primitive: Anna is confronted with her vows, falls for an itinerant jazz musician who looks like Andrew Garfield, and the concatenated plot clicks forward like stills in a photo essay. Anna's waffling has to do with more than capitalism versus communism, materialism versus spirituality; it has something to do with the legacy of those relatives who were murdered when the world was on its head and knees. The transition from Nazism to Stalinism hasn't been a progression. Somehow, someway Anna has to cut against that grain.
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