In 1962, a sheltered nun is preparing to take her vows. Her convent gives her one last job before she can take them – visit her aunt, her sole surviving relative. “Get to know your family”, or something like that.
The aunt, Wanda, is a silver-tongued judge for Poland’s Communist government, and she doesn’t waste time dropping truth bombs. In quick succession: the nun’s real name is Ida, she’s actually Jewish, her family was murdered during World War 2. Ida wants closure. To get closure, she drafts Wanda into a cross-country road trip, a quest to find her parents’ final resting place.
This film is Ida, a return home of sorts for My Summer of Love director Paweł Pawlikowski. It’s a film deeply rooted in the wounds of Communist Poland, the scars of the German invasion. But it’s also a film that feels oddly out of time.
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That’s a lot to do with how it looks. Ida is shot in black and white and Academy ratio, a consciously old-fashioned choice that places the film within an older filmmaking tradition, a la Michael Hazanavicius’ The Artist or Miguel Gomes’ Tabu. Pawlikowski situates Ida within the tradition of transcendental cinema, alongside European filmmakers Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson. You can see it in the chilly everyday of Ida’s convent and Wanda’s Poland (the latter remarkably evoked through sound design in a wonderful courtroom sequence, the staccato taps of a typewriter drowning out an echoing prosecutor); the disparity created by Ida’s past; the hard stasis of the final scene.
But Pawlikowski isn’t following Hazanavicius’ lead and making some fawning circlejerk to his idols, nor is he offering an arch commentary on the tradition whose style he borrows like Gomes. Ida owes a debt to the likes of Dreyer and Bresson, but it also brings a modern touch in its dynamic use of negative space and framing. While the camera rarely moves, it’s frequently positioned so that action takes place on the edges of the frame, to the sides and in the gutter. Ida, Wanda and the people they encounter are dwarfed by their surroundings, their actions always sharing space with buildings and forests and space. Sometimes, that space is only filled with flat grey sky, the ultimate in the unfeeling everyday. Bresson played with this type of space – see The Trial of Joan of Arc and parts of A Man Escaped – but Pawlikowski’s full-on commitment to it (the number of close-ups in this film is probably in the single digits) disturbs any idea that this is mere aping of post-war European arthouse.
Ida is awkward and fidgety when interacting with the world around her, as if weighing her life up in every touch and conversation
That use of empty space also plays into the film’s discussion of our identities and how they interact with our past. Ida’s staunch Catholic faith is quietly undermined by her personal connection to the Holocaust, and her chaste conservative ideals are cast into new light by her booze-swilling aunt and a Jean-Claude Brialy-looking dude with a saxophone and a neat quiff. At the same time, Wanda struggles with her role as an apparatus of a state she devoted herself to at the expense of her family, a woman who once fought to save lives but now sends people to their death. Even the Jean-Claude Brialy-looking dude identifies with John Coltrane in the way people typically identify with Americans in these kinds of films.
All the characters are at a crossroads between the personal and the historical, wrestling with the contradictions it creates to the point where it feels like little exists outside of that wrestling. Thankfully, lead actresses Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska are good at suggesting a world outside. Kulesza plays Wanda with a well-used facade of wonderful sourness, and Trzebuchowska’s Ida is awkward and fidgety when interacting with the world around her, as if weighing her life up in every touch and conversation. But even in its silences, Ida can be hamhanded.
That said, though, there’s a lot here worth exploring, not least Pawlikowski’s use of that transcendental style to express difficult thoughts about personal, national and spiritual identity in the wake of world-changing tragedy. And perhaps the most fascinating part of the movie is its cynicism. As much as Ida’s characters attempt to negotiate their pasts and square them with their own self-reckons, Pawlikowski takes them down roads that suggest we’re more comfortable burying our past, escaping the world that reminds us of it, then we are coming to terms with it. That’s perhaps what makes the film feel most out of time. The universal desire to forget.
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