Review by Christina Newland
Ida
release date 26th September
cert (12a)
director Pawel Pawlikowski writers Pawel Pawlikowski, Rebecca Lenkiewicz starring Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik
62
SEPTEMBER 2014 VERITE
Ida takes place in Poland circa 1961, but the lonely world it depicts seems remote - even alien - from any explanatory historical context. A work of steady, quiet beauty in high contrast black and white, director Pawel Pawlikowski borrows from the visual vocabulary of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Ida Lebenstein (Agata Trzebuchowska) is an eighteen-year-old nun-to-be, raised in a convent after being orphaned at a very young age. Just before she is set to take her vows, her Mother Superior informs her that she has an aunt, by the name of Wanda that would like to meet her. Ida is an inexperienced, almost expressionless young woman; an image of timid piety. Yet she seems unfazed when she finds herself in Wanda’s city apartment, amorous men slipping out the front door. In fact, she hardly reacts when her aunt - a sophisticated single woman with a miasma of deep melancholy about her - informs her that she is, in fact, a “Jewish nun”. Ida’s parents were killed during the war, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves. The questions that remain concern the details of their deaths, and the anonymous location of their burial. For Wanda, with Ida’s company, these are mysteries that she must set out to solve. A Stalinist ex-prosecutor, “Red Wanda” represents a foil to everything young Ida stands for - an aggressively atheist revolutionary in a cocktail dress. Actress Agata Kulesza carries the role with mournful elegance; she needles her niece about her devotion to God. But Ida remains drawn in by the earthly mystery of Wanda’s sophistication and loneliness. The two women are united in a desire for the truth, and set out on a journey to question the last known individuals who saw Ida’s parents alive. They meet with many slammed doors and unfriendly faces - fifteen years after the Nazis have decimated Poland, survivors are not keen to dig up the past. Pawlikowski films the women’s grim search with a stark, almost otherworldly modernism; all jagged lines, spiral staircases, and extreme angles. Figures move in and out of shot mid-speech; faces sink to the bottom of the frame so that we are only privy to their eyes. There are touches of Vermeer, at times. The film is hauntingly beautiful - so why does it feel so much like window dressing? Some of the trouble lies in Trzebuchowska’s lack of interiority. She is unblinking and impenetrable. Ida’s blankness may or may not be of the Bressonian tradition, but the actress doesn’t quite pull it off here. A series of tumultuous events befall Ida, but her responses to them seem pre-determined; almost without motivation. Her flight from Catholicism should have been life-altering, but it feels strangely anti-climactic. For all of Pawlikowski’s aesthetic austerity and tonal coherence, the film never reaches the emotional heights or cerebral insight of Bresson or Dreyer. Ida’s visuals will linger, but its closing moments do not leave one with much once the credits have rolled.