Ida – review

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Ida begins with four young women in a convent carrying a statue of Christ outside to be erected, proceeding then to stand in a half-moon around the risen effigy, praying in the silence and the snow. It is a stark, oblique and beautiful opening set in Poland in the early 1960s, a country still reeling from the genocide and destruction of the second world war.

One of these women is novitiate nun and orphan Anna (played by Agata Trzebuchowska), who is summoned to her Mother Superior’s office and instructed to visit her last living relative, her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), whom she has never met. Reluctantly she obeys, and leaves the convent for the nearby metropolis. Upon arriving, Wanda informs her niece she is in fact not called Anna but Ida, born to Jewish parents, who lie murdered in some unknown grave. The two women set out in search of Ida’s parents’ remains and the circumstances of their deaths, on a journey which sees these two very different women — one worldly and disillusioned, the other young and assured of her faith — drawn together in their search for a past which has hitherto been obscured to them.

Ida is poignant and detached in equal measure, treating its characters with integrity and sympathy, yet offering them no comforting resolution. The culmination of the plot’s central movement, the search for the grave, offers no redemption, no closure. Rather it acts as a somewhat depressing metaphor for the inescapable horror of the past, the insidious and far reaching effects of the war, and the irrevocable toll it has taken on human hearts and human bodies.

The most impressive achievement of the film is its cinematography: the frozen landscapes, decrepit buildings and artfully composed scenes captured by an unflinching camera in stunning black and white. Director Pawel Pawlikowski uses angles, shapes and light more than words, colour or movement to present his story, and in such a masterful way that such elements seem almost surplus to this brief but powerful film. The film’s visual beauty feels increasingly purposeless alongside its essentially nihilistic heart, much like the protagonist’s growing awareness that her own youth and beauty will lead only to imprisonment, either within a conventional marriage or a cycle of meaningless affairs like her aunt. Love and faith are denied as possibilities of meaning in the post-war landscape. There is no romantic or religious moral to the story; such an approach, the film suggests (never in an overt or confrontational way), would be trite in the face of such endemic damage.

“And then what?” Ida asks at one point. “And then what?”. “Nothing” is the film’s implicit answer to her question, and so Ida and her aunt turn their backs on what the world has (and hasn’t) got to offer with their respective final gestures of rejection. Ida is superbly acted by both Kulesza, a leading figure in Polish film and television, and Trzebuchowska in her accidental debut (she was discovered by Pawlikowski while reading in a café in Warsaw), and is certainly worth a watch, by virtue of the sublime cinematography alone.

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