Anna grew up in a covent, sheltered from the everyday struggles. Wanda, a bitter stalinist show-trial prosecuting star, has experienced all life-shattering things there are and grew incredibly thick skin. A naïve, motherless girl, discovering the truth about her family and a childless mother ripping the unhealable wounds from the past open. When the faithful novice is forced by Mother Superior to visit her only remaining relative before taking the vows, she discovers her jewish descendance and true name – Ida – and embarks on an usual journey. Introspective and retrospective at once, transformative, self exploratory and with its final destination remaining elusive, as classic road movies ought to be. But Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida is quietly revolutionary within its 4:3 aspect ratio, classic black and white cinematography and seemingly conventional genre frame.
Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) has co-written Ida, his first polish film, with Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the British playwright known for creating emotionally charged dramas focusing on marginalized female characters. Set in 1962, communist Poland, “it’s based on lots of true stories of children given away in pogroms, who were brought up Catholic” – Lenkiewicz told The Guardian. As the director revealed in one of the interviews, Ida’s character is loosely based on Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, a catholic priest who found out he was Jewish. The figure of Wanda Gruz, Ida’s aunt, was inspired by a figure of Helena Brus-Wolińska, who Pawlikowski met in late 80. In an interview with Poland’s leading newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza Pawlikowski described her as “such a nice lady. Open, ironic, warm.” It came as a shock to him when years later he “learned that Polish authorities want her extradition (..) she was a political beast, she really believed in Marksism and Leninism. It’s incredible what a human is capable of in only one life.”
The evolution of the onscreen dynamic in Wanda/Ida relationship is a masterfully plotted, fascinating spectacle. Harsh and unapologetic, Wanda is like an exotic species to Ida. When, without courtesy and sugar coating, she directly faces the girl with the traumatic truth about her origins and deceased parents, the stunned novice decides to embark on the quest to find their burial place and learn how they died. Naturally, Ida’s overshadowed with a sense of confusion, respectful and modestly withdrew, just as the sisters taught her. Wanda, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the do’s and dont’s. She feels privileged and takes advantage of her slowly fading position, talking to people as if she was still in the courtroom, examining them unrestingly, even in places which majestic character completely disarms other people, like an ER room.
Ida watches the way Wanda handles people with bewilderment and discomfort that are still not able to undermine her utter fascination. The woman’s heart is as dark as Ida’s starry eyes, but hides no less sensitivity underneath its poisonous surface. “If you could lick my heart it would poison you” says a peasant to Claude Lanzmann in Shoah. J. Hoberman referenced the very quote in his Tablet review, and it does seem to describe Wanda the best. But there is a certain symmetry between those, otherwise strikingly different characters. Ida’s light brightens Wanda’s darkness and the Aunt’s bluntness scars Ida’s naivety. They’re like missing pieces of the puzzle, not only because of their newly found family ties.
The lead performances are simply stunning. The film is titled after Agata Trzebuchowska’s character, and the brilliant newcomer raises up to the challenge. She manages to maturely embrace the concept of meaningful asceticism, delivering most sophisticated emotions through very simple body language, voice modulation and powerfully restraint mimics. She also doesn’t stand out compared to Agata Kulesza, one of Poland’s best dramatic actresses.
Pawlikowski, along with his editor, Jarosław Kamiński, is masterfully breaking the viewing and editing habits without being flashy. The understated, piercingly emotional climaxes always come as a surprise, suddenly stirring the constantly simmering emotional tension pot. What also stands out here is the incredibly thoughtful and climatic cinematography, planned by acclaimed Ryszard Lenczewski and executed by up-and-coming Łukasz Żal.
“Given that the film takes place in the 60s, during a time when everything in Poland felt black and white, it was natural for the movie’s look to fit the era” – explained Lenczewski while talking to LenseCulture, also naming Jeanloup Sieff, Erving Penn and Henri Carier Bresson his inspirations. The storyboards were based on over 3,000 photos he took while researching in the polish countryside. Ida‘s framing is classical yet at the same time innovative and truly modern. The composition within the 4:3 space is very often rather abstractly composed, with numerous contemplative and lively, asymmetrical detail shots balancing the nostalgic, seemingly endless landscapes, evoking a deep sense of sadness and loneliness, defining both the characters, and the time they live in.
There has been another polish film about dealing with painful past: the Polish-Jewish relationships during the Second World War and its contemporary impact on the issues of identity, heritage, own-outsider boundaries definitions that withstood the passing of time. Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath got limited distribution in the US past fall and gained rather positive reviews, including a seal of approval from J. Hoberman in his The New York Times review; “Predicated on the unraveling of the social fabric is a thriller that’s meant to stun” – and quite succeeds in doing so, suggested the acclaimed author. Ida and Aftermath are not telling the exact same story, but they are both dealing with similar issues. There are hostile peasant boors immune to tolerance, well-concealed hate crimes resulting from broken wartime morality and belief-based tension, jewish displacement and property-stealing in the midst of post-war turmoil. And fading memories held by the “just ones” or miraculous survivors are the only trace of shadows of the “forgotten ancestors”, who never got a definable and worthy resting place. There is even a matching scene in both films – a discovery of a grave, full of scattered bones of those brutally deprived of their last breath.
And maybe here the opposing poetics of the storytelling can be best seen. While Pasikowski indulges in boldness and impudent symbols, never shying away from yet another scandalous controversy, Pawlikowski finds time to let the silence speak. Parting glances, half-broken smiles. Saxophone sound infusing the air with sexual tension, first uncovering of the hair, nightly prayer. Car being towed away from a ditch instead of pep-talk about addictions. A pearl necklace lost in folds of a wrinkled duvet like the last sign of a long gone greatness. While Pasikowski created a screamer, Pawlikowski delivers a whisperer. I don’t think Ida was at any point meant to stun in the sense Aftermath was. Yet, quietly and poignantly, it does, proving that less is sometimes not more, but everything.
