IDA
Polish
Cinema
Pawel Pawlikowski, 2014
1, 2, 3…. 18! Ready or not, here it comes! In most countries, turning 18 is the moment when the time to find out who you are, and what you want for your life, is up. It is the moment when the society makes you responsible for your destiny. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a young orphan lady, raised by Polish mothers from the `60, has to take the vows for chastity and poverty when she turns 18, in order to continue her life at the monastery as a nun. Otherwise, she won′t be able to live inside the monastery anymore. Mothe abbot knows that Anna can′t be allowed to take such an important decision without knowing the truth about her past, so she helps her to get in touch with her only living relative, her mother′s sister, Wanda Cruz. Leaving her primitive space where she grew up without meeting any of the world′s pleasures, Anna arrives at her aunt′s door, from where she can hear loud dancing music. A certain man wearing a white undershirt can be seen on the bed in the next room. When leaving, he and Wanda greet each other with “May God bless you” (a strange greeting for the communism period). Being left alone, the aunt lets Anna know that she is a “Jewish nun”, and her real name is Ida Libenstein.Instead, Wanda is a former prosecutor , “an iron woman of the socialism”, who has condemned many people. Changed by history (Nazism and communism), both women are survivors, with or without will, who have adapted to the required conditions.
The director Pawel Pawlikowski (“My summer of love”, with Emily Blunt), born in Poland, but raised in the UK, gave his characters the mission of simultaneously confronting their painful past, unsafe present and confusing future. Anna accepts her new identity without protesting, but beyond the name, she doesn′t give any sing of wanting to change anything else, but continues to wear her novice nun clothes, praying to the God that has raised her and keeping reading the Bible.
Faced with the only photo of baby Ida and her mother, the girl finds out that she was born by a woman with an artistic soul, which always used to make something out of cloth or glass, and out of uninteresting man, a little primitive. Ida has grown up so isolated, that she has no idea about the Holocaust and she wants to visit her parents′ graves, not knowing that “there is no Jew to have a grave”. Wanda is the one who, knowing the
demons from the past, comes with the idea of a trip back to family′s village, in order to discover Ida′s parents′ burying place, after they have been killed by the Polish neighbours who have hidden them for a while. On their way, Wanda tries to give Ida life lessons at a fast tempo, on the principle “What kind of sacrifice is this if you monk yourself without any idea about what you give up?”. The aunt, a worldly woman, smokes all the time, drinks while driving, hooks up with men, listens to loud music and tries to commit burglary in the old polish man′s flat, who took over Libestein family′s house.
Ida, being treated by Pawlikowski as one of Iohannes Vermeer painter’s characters, keeps her grace, as well as her state of grace in any situation. Although it may be thought that she′s incapble of understanding what is happening with her, in the end she demonstrates that her monastery education has helped her to choose and keep only the essential out of all the emotions, actions and thoughts that people complicate their lives with. Even if she is full of empathy and compassion,just as the monastery′s rooms fill up with echos sometimes, (echos of authems or of cutlery clutches as dinners are being taken at the tables in silence), Ida is tough and inflexible. People don′t daze or scare her.Her outgoing aunt, the young saxophonist fascinated by Ida′s dimples from her chin and cheeks or the neighbor that negotiates roughly with her, giving up on the heritage of the house in return for parents′ bones, they all bring her only opportunities to reconfirm certainties which the girl has grown up with.
After awarding Pawlikowski′s black and white movie with the highest distinction of the country,Poland signed up “Ida” in the race for the Oscar that was awarded in 2015, to the best foreign movie from 2014. Many chronicles have highlighted that “Ida” could function the same even without sound, because the images- carefully compounded, shot by shot- communicate the entire story, anyway. On the other hand, the chronicles have highlighted the directing effort based only on the visual composition. Throughout its 80 minutes, “Ida” has managed to leave me with a dilemma: what defines, in the end, the people capable of taking the right decisions in tough situations?