Starring: Agata Kuleszi, Agata Tzrebuchowska.
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 80 mins. Reviewed in May 2014
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This is a very striking black and white film, both interesting and challenging.
Director Pawel Pawlikowski went from Poland to the United Kingdom several years ago and made two very well-received films, The Last Resort, about difficulties migrants faced in coming to Britain, and My Summer of Love, a coming of age story of two young women in the English countryside. Now, he has returned to Poland with a story of his country before and during World War II and into the 1960s and the drab era of the communist regime.
The film is of great interest to Polish audiences at home and around the world, a story which takes them back to the relationship between the traditional Polish citizens and the Jews, the anti-Semitic experiences and some help between Catholics and Jews.
A statue of Jesus is the opening image of the film, a group of novice nuns in the 1960s cleaning and repairing this statue which is then put on a pedestal outside the convent. One of the novices is Anna who is preparing for her vows in the coming week. She is called in to see the superior who suggests she go to visit her only surviving relative, an aunt. Because Anna has lived in the orphanage and the convent all her life, she is reluctant to go. The superior orders her to go. She does and does not find an instant warm welcome from her aunt.
We realise that the superior has strong reasons for sending Anna on this visit. Without any preparation, the aunt explains to her that her name is not Anna but Ida and that she is Jewish, something of which the young novice was completely unaware.
Anna immediately calls herself Ida. Her parents were killed during the war and her aunt, who is a local magistrate and respected by the regime, decides that they should go to find out the truth about what had happened. This takes them to the old family home, the farmer and his wife who live there now, his elderly father who is in the hospital, and information about where the family had been buried. For Ida, the explanation of how she came to be in the Catholic orphanage is important and, in the midst of brutal anti-Semitism, there is a moment of grace in the saving of the young child.
The aunt questions Ida about her vocation, her isolation from the world and from any worldly experience and how she can make her vows. There is some complication when aunt and niece give a lift to a musician who plays with his band in the local club.
Of particular interest is the crisis that Ida must face in terms of her commitment, her lack of sexual awareness, of the ordinary trappings of the world, including clothing, smoking, alcohol. The film resolves the crisis with a blend of drama and quiet underplaying.
In fact, the film is reminiscent of classic Polish films of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed in austere black and white, an emphasis on close-ups and body language, classic framing for encounters, a reminder of the qualities of this kind of fine but less complicated film-making.
Ida won an ecumenical award in Warsaw Film Festival, 2013.
12 Random Films…
