Pawel Pawlikowski (2013)
The hook of Ida is the discovery by Anna, a young Polish novitiate, raised in an orphanage then in the convent where she is shortly to take her vows, that she is Jewish and that her parents were murdered during World War II by Polish Catholics. In fact, this is one of two interwined stories in Pawel Pawlikowski’s film (his first feature, strange as it seems, made in the language of his native Poland). The other story is that of Anna’s second thoughts about her vocation. These thoughts are brought on, it seems, less by the truth of her ethnic-religious ancestry than by a different aspect of her exposure to the outside world – terra incognita until the head of the convent instructs Anna to visit her one living relative, an aunt, before she takes her vows.
The aunt’s name is Wanda Gruz. The time is the early 1960s and Wanda has had a successful career as a prosecutor and a judge in Communist Poland. Now in her forties, she’s bitterly disillusioned with the regime and loathes herself for being its functionary, especially for sanctioning political executions; she drinks heavily and sleeps around. It’s Wanda who matter-of-factly tells her niece, when Anna turns up at her apartment, that her real name is Ida Lebenstein and about the fate of her Jewish parents. She takes Anna/Ida to the smallholding where Wanda believes the killing took place and the two women try to discover from the man who now lives there – and subsequently from his elderly, ailing father (whom Wanda believes hid her sister and brother-in-law before betraying them) – where the bodies are buried. It transpires that the killings were carried out not by the older man but by Feliks, the younger one, when he was a teenager; and that the victims included Wanda’s own son, left in the care of her sister so that Wanda could concentrate on her work for the Polish Resistance. When Anna asks why she was spared, Feliks explains that she was too young and fair-haired for anyone to know that she was Jewish, unlike her ‘dark and circumcised’ older cousin.
During her visit, Anna also accompanies Wanda to a club that she frequents. It’s here that the younger woman, still wearing her religious uniform, experiences jazz for the first time and, in particular, a good-looking saxophonist called Lis. She finds his playing of a John Coltrane piece captivating; Anna’s unusual attractiveness has a similar effect on Lis. There’s an immediate spark between Agata Trzebuchowska’s Anna and Dawid Ogrodnik, who plays the saxophonist (very well), yet it’s hard at first to tell how much Anna is drawn physically to Lis. Wanda, irritated by Anna’s religious piety, has asked earlier in the film if she ever has impure thoughts. Anna admits that she does but her answer to Wanda’s next question – ‘Carnal thoughts?’ – is no. Besides, Agata Trzebuchowska is nothing if not inscrutable. Her appealingly childish, Slavic-featured face holds the camera but gives little away – her response to the news that she’s ethnically Jewish appears as dispassionate as Wanda’s informing her of it sounded. Once the family graves have been found, Anna returns to the convent but apologises to God that she’s not ready to take her vows. She watches her peers taking theirs then goes back outside, in the direction of her aunt’s apartment.
The experiences of recent days have depressed Wanda beyond the point of no return: she turns up the volume on a piece of Mozart on her record player and commits suicide, stepping out of the high apartment window in the straightforward manner in which she revealed to her niece her Jewish origins. Pawel Pawlikowski then cuts to Anna in the same room that Wanda has exited. Anna puts on not only the Mozart record but also one of Wanda’s slinky dresses; she smokes a cigarette and consumes alcohol greedily. She then returns to the night club. When Anna first met Lis, my reaction was to think it was a pity they wouldn’t be able to get together but I needn’t have worried. They now go to bed at his place. In their post-coital conversation, Anna asks what happens next. Lis says they’ll get a dog, get married, have children (I’m sure the dog came first) – in other words, live the sort of life that people live in a non-celibate world. Anna smiles in response but, when she wakes next morning, she leaves Wanda’s dress and high heels on the floor, puts on her novice habit and goes back to the convent, presumably ready – now that she’s had sex and been given a clue of what she can expect to follow it – to take her vows and dedicate her life to God. I’m not sure if her decision is meant to be surprising but it wasn’t to me. I couldn’t help thinking the clinching factor was the prospect of marrying someone who, however charming he might be in other respects, was always going to be playing jazz. I could see why entering a closed order for the rest of your life might be a preferable alternative.
The black and white images of Ida are meticulously composed and lit (the cinematographers are Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski) but the visual studiedness is intrusive, sometimes counterproductive. When the jazz band first appears, it’s apparently late in the evening and the club is pretty deserted. Pawel Pawlikowski shows Lis and his colleagues in the background; in the foreground is a littered floor. Each of the pieces of litter looks perfectly placed – the detritus has the quality not of mess but of set dressing. Pawlikowski often positions people low in the frame (occasionally with their faces cut off at the mouth) – they are dominated by the blank exterior of buildings or the minimally decorated walls of the convent chapel or the nuns’ cells. This is certainly distinctive but I struggled to understand its meaning (it’s not as if the human beings ‘don’t matter’ compared with where they live). In contrast, the shot of Feliks (Adam Szyszkowski) confessing to the killings of Anna and Wanda’s family and hunkered down in the grave he’s just excavated, is too emphatically claustrophobic. Just as blatantly fancy is the image of Anna, once she’s wearing Wanda’s dress etc, wrapped in a transparent curtain and swivelling drunkenly in her aunt’s apartment. I did like a shot, held for some time, in which Anna and Lis stand next to each other, with her left and his right elbow so close together that it’s hard to tell whether they’re touching or if she is avoiding touch.
Agata Kulesza’s performance as Wanda has been particularly praised and won prizes at festivals and this year’s Best Actress ‘Eagle’ in Poland’s national film awards. (Dawid Ogrodnik won the Best Actor Eagle at the same awards for a different film, Life Feels Good, in which he plays a man with cerebral palsy.) Kulesza, a big name in Poland, is a strong presence although I found her playing actressy compared with that of the rest of the cast, which also includes Jerzy Trela, as Feliks’ father, doing a familiar turn: a person on their deathbed gasps out significant-but-cryptic remarks. There are omissions in the script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Pawlikowski that are frustrating and/or convenient. Has Wanda tried before to locate the family graves (if not, why not)? How do the convent powers-that-be react to Anna’s deciding against taking her vows and heading out a second time? Does Lis find Anna, in her femme fatale get-up, attractive in the same way he did when she was dressed in a habit? (He doesn’t remark on the wardrobe change.) Pawlikowski, as well as Agata Kulesza, has been honoured for Ida, which was awarded Best Film in last year’s London Film Festival; but, beneath the impressive control and construction of its chilly images, the film seemed to me unimaginative – even clichéd in the way that Anna turns temporarily into Wanda/a woman of the world. I suspect it’s because Ida deals with ethnic and political identity and guilt so obviously (and on the surface) that critics have decided it must have creative insights into these themes.
30 September 2014
