Ida

Earth appears slight­ly off its axis in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. Sky­lines and ceil­ings are mas­sive, extend­ing the dis­tance between man and God. The human body is often rel­e­gat­ed to the bot­tom of each image, giv­ing many of the black-and-white com­po­si­tions a suf­fo­cat­ing appeal. It’s com­mon to find faces split down the mid­dle by the edges of the frame, stress­ing the end­less pull of off-screen space. One might think such jar­ring mise-en-scéné would inspire a sense of men­ace, but instead Pawlikowski’s aes­thet­ic is primed to con­sid­er the often-rocky rela­tion­ship between world con­flict and heav­en­ly grace.

For a film deal­ing with heavy mate­r­i­al such as trau­ma, com­mu­ni­ty repres­sion and the long­stand­ing hor­rors of the Holo­caust, Ida unfolds in sur­pris­ing­ly qui­et fash­ion. The ear­ly moments con­tain very lit­tle dia­logue, but each glance car­ries weight, each action a sense of pur­pose. Anna (Aga­ta Trze­bu­chows­ka) and her fel­low novi­tiate nuns go about their dai­ly rou­tine at a con­vent in the Pol­ish coun­try­side with­out say­ing a word. Before tak­ing her final vows, Anna’s moth­er supe­ri­or sug­gests she vis­it her last liv­ing rel­a­tive in the city. Paw­likows­ki han­dles the tran­si­tion almost like an after­thought, but like every small shift in Ida, the sub­tleties matter.

Set dur­ing the ear­ly 1960s, Ida is very much a film about look­ing back and address­ing the gen­er­a­tional pain caused by World War Two. Up to this point, Anna has avoid­ed deal­ing with the past, but that changes when she meets her aunt Wan­da (Aga­ta Kulesza), an alco­holic court judge who has spent the bet­ter part of two decades sen­tenc­ing Ger­man sym­pa­this­ers to prison or death. Dur­ing her time with Wan­da, Anna dis­cov­ers that she is Jew­ish and that Ida is her giv­en name. The two women even­tu­al­ly trav­el to the small town where their fam­i­ly mem­bers were mur­dered dur­ing the war with the hopes of find­ing clo­sure. Instead, they dis­cov­er a lin­ger­ing under­cur­rent of anti-Semitism.

In this sense, Ida is sto­ry of ghosts and the peo­ple try­ing to qui­et their cries. Wanda’s per­sis­tence stems from long­stand­ing grief and an inabil­i­ty to let go of the past. Her fam­i­ly tree has been near­ly wiped out and she recruits Anna to be a part of one last attempt to reclaim a sense of iden­ti­ty. This reunion also pro­vides Paw­likows­ki the oppor­tu­ni­ty to jux­ta­pose two very dif­fer­ent ide­olo­gies. ​“Do you have sin­ful thoughts?,” the sex­u­al­ly active Wan­da asks her devout niece. Anna replies in the affir­ma­tive, spend­ing the rest of the film grap­pling with the com­plex­i­ty of her answer.

There are echoes of Bergman and Wen­ders to the film’s mea­sured pac­ing, min­i­mal­ist design and reli­gious under­tones, yet no real auteurist com­par­i­son does the film jus­tice. Paw­likowk­si has craft­ed a unique­ly spar­tan film that charts the rip­ple effect of his­to­ry on the every­day per­son, prov­ing that secrets can be repressed only for so long. The film also sug­gests that faith and sin can exist in the same moment with­out shame or judg­ment. Reduc­ing life to one or the oth­er feels like a cheat.