The Wandering Review: ‘Ida’

 By Laurie Baron

SAN DIEGO-The exquisite black and white cinematography of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida mesmerizes audiences. Each meticulously composed and highly textured frame enhances the film’s acting, dialogue, and moments of silence. They capture the bleakness of communist Poland in the 1960s and the psychological turmoil gnawing at the souls of the novitiate nun Anna played by Agata Trzebuchowska and her dissolute Aunt Wanda played by Agata Kulesza.

But there’s also much substance behind the style of Ida. When we first see Anna, she is dedicated to her future religious service as a bride of Christ. She and other novitiates from her convent set up a statue depicting the Crucifixion as a symbol of their faith and hope in the middle of a dark, frigid, and snow-covered courtyard. The verities she accepts without question are about to be challenged. The Mother Superior informs that she must visit her only living relative to find out more about her background.

Aunt Wanda, a veteran of the communist partisans and former state prosecutor who has sent many political dissidents to jail and some to their deaths, shares little but lineage with her niece, whose Jewish name was Ida. A confirmed atheist, Wanda drinks and smokes heavily and fills her nights with casual trysts with men she picks up. Yet she knows that Ida’s parents left her at the convent and then were killed while trying to hide in the forest from the Germans. She invites Ida to investigate what happened to them and find where they are buried. The search by this odd couple―Wanda bluntly tells Ida, “I’m the slut and you’re the little saint.’―provides some humor in this otherwise solemn movie.

Their quest eventually discloses disturbing revelations that fellow Poles and not the Nazis betrayed Ida’s parents and that Wanda’s son was murdered along with them. Stunned by what they discover, Wanda falls deeper into her cynical despair, and, Ida briefly doubts whether she should become a nun. An alternative life presents itself in the form of a saxophonist Szymon (Jerzy Trela) whose performances of American jazz classics are the musical antithesis of the hymns Anna is accustomed to singing

While Anna’s dilemma may seem contrived, it is firmly anchored in the “suddenly Jewish” phenomenon Barbara Kessel has documented. In Eastern European countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been many cases of adults raised as communists or as Christians who have learned upon the deaths of their adoptive grandparents or parents that their biological parents were Jews who hid them with Gentile families or in convents to save their lives during World War Two. [For more on those raised by nuns, see Nahum Bogner’s detailed article] If one can fault Pawlikowski for his otherwise moving film, it is that he opts for a rather ephemeral resolution to Anna’s identity crisis rather than have her evince some interest in what it means to be Jewish.

Pawikowski also should be commended for his forthright depiction of Polish complicity in the Holocaust or indifference towards Jewish neighbors. On this point, his film echoes a cycle of recent Polish productions like Aftermath and In Darkness. Ida may be set in the past, but the issues it raises are hotly debated in today’s Poland.

Ida already has garnered many Polish and international film awards. Although it is probably too early to tell, I expect that it will be nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and that it has a good chance of winning it too. Don’t miss it!
*

Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University.  He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com