IDA: Starring Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Rated M (Mature themes). 80 minutes
By Donata Morelli
THE film takes place in the early 1960s, in Poland, in the middle of the time of the Communist regime. Anna is a young novice who is about to take her vows as a religious sister.
She lives in a desolate convent with a few sisters, shrouded in silence and in the daily rituals of prayer and convent life.
Anna arrived at the convent at an early age and from there she never left, not even to meet her only relative, her aunt Wanda. Almost forced by her mother superior, Anna travels to Warsaw to meet her aunt a few weeks before taking vows.
Wanda is about 50, single, intellectual, elegant and casual, but visibly disillusioned, bordering on cynicism. She belongs to the elite of the Communist regime, being a judge, a former fighter in the anti-Nazi resistance and in the militant party. She hides a great suffering that she tries to forget, living a life full of sex and alcohol.
The aunt briefly illustrates to Anna her tremendous familiar truth – Anna is Jewish and her name is Ida.
During the war, her family had taken refuge in their small farm, and had been “helped” by some Polish peasants. Then Anna’s parents were killed in mysterious circumstances.
As a final step toward her family reconnection, the girl wants to find out where the remains of her parents are buried.
Wanda agrees to drive her in the search.
At the end of this trip, the clash between the two personalities will lead to a mutual awareness.
While Wanda will put a full-stop to all her disappointments, Ida will try to respond to Wanda’s question – how do you know the extent of your sacrifice in taking vows if you’ve never experienced the real life?
Where is the nobility of your sacrifice?
The intense blood bond brings Ida to make one last trip, purely personal, to mature and to confirm her vocational choice.
It’s a trip that leads her closer to her aunt’s life choices, as an extreme step before her commitment to God.
The beauty of Pawel Pawlikowski’s film lies in the simplicity and the style of a story where the faces and the settings come together and alternate in a “dance” of extreme visual formal precision.
Often the camera puts in the foreground a face, then enlarges the scene to understand a strict framework, where nothing seems left to chance and where the location of the actors and the interaction with the dominant lights have a precise thematic meaning – a representation that takes advantage of the use of filming in black-and-white.
Any disclosure of the story emerges from restrained and meaningful dialogues and from the silences among them. The same happens also with the pauses in the soundtrack, an element that carves out a role certainly not marginal in the film. The performances by both the protagonist actors are excellent.
The meaning that sits at the bottom of the story is all in the question (“And then what?”) that the novice asks to a young jazz saxophonist (Dawid Ogrodnik) she meets in a pub while travelling with Wanda.
There lies the deeper significance of the life choice of the girl.
The “simple” end of the film – Ida’s face, and a placid but determined walk “upstream” to the direction of some cars. On that road and on that face, the meaning of everything, is something that stays long in the mind and heart of the viewer.
This is a movie not to be missed.
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