The movie: Ida.

Ida - Photo courtesy of Pinterest

A friend suggested seeing the movie Ida. It is a beautifully shot black and white movie that reminds you of Vermeer paintings. It came out a while back and I missed it at the cinema at the time. At the beginning of the movie, I thought how beautiful it was, but as the movie goes along, the grey  landscape and the minimal way it is shot feels oppressive; however, it is oppressive and beautiful at the same time. This is the story of Anna, a novice catholic nun, 17 years old, who has lived all her life inside a convent, and has not experienced life in the world outside.  She is about to take her final vows in the convent where she was abandoned as an orphan baby. But she has one surviving relative, her aunt. The Mother Superior insists she contacts her aunt before Anna, later known as Ida, takes her final vows.

Ida - Photo courtesy of Pinterest

Her aunt, Wanda Gruz, played by Agata Kulesza, is a completely opposite character to Ida.  She is a combative, hard-drinking woman who lives on her own and is a far more interesting character than Ida. When Ida goes to meet her aunt for the first time, Wanda is standing near the window in the kitchen, chain smoking, in her dressing gown, a man is lying in bed next door. One makes some immediate assumptions about Wanda. Pawlikowski the director encourages this by taking a direct camera shot at the man in bed. The whole setting of the scene leads you  to understand that Wanda is not married, and the situation is that Ida is meeting her aunt just after she has been having sex. But Wanda is not what you might think, she is actually a magistrate.

Ida - Photo courtesy of Pinterest

Wanda brutally tells her niece who she, Anna, really is. Anna's original name is Ida Lebestein, and she is Jewish. So she says to her niece, sarcastically; you know you are a Jewish nun! There is shock in Ida's face, it is all understated acting. This piece of information changes everything. It will make her question her faith and who she is in the world. Ida says to Wanda that she wants to know what happened to her parents during the war. Wanda and you yourself the viewer are dreading this as you know very well what happened to Jewish people during World War II in Poland, the Holocaust. As the viewer you know that this is going to be a difficult, emotional journey. But Wanda takes charge and they set off on a road trip.

Ida - Photos courtesy of Pinterest

This is a dark journey, one that questions the silence of the Catholic Church, depicts anti-semitism, the awful things people do to survive, and how do they live or not with their decisions afterwards.  This is in stark contrast with Ida the nun, her innocence, her naivety, her habits which have all been established by a pre-ordered system, her going to bed at the same time, saying prayers at the same time. Her status as a nun gives her the respect of the local people in Catholic Poland which is almost comical, as you now know she was born Jewish.

Ida - Photos courtesy of Pinterest

Wanda opens up and pushes the local people in the village with force and coercion to tell her the truth about what happened to Ida's parents and at this stage you realise it is not Ida who is most affected by this but it is actually Wanda. Her sister was murdered in a forest. In one particular scene you can hear the sound of the wind and the rattling of Ida's parents' bones which they take to bury properly, and you realise why she is the way she is: the heavy drinking, constantly sleeping with men, not able to be close to anybody. All this makes you realise that she is the one who survived, she carries the weight of these wartime experiences.... does she now suffer from survival guilt?

Ida - Photos courtesy of Pinterest

Ida realises as well that Wanda, the only surviving relative of her family, is lost and depressed; there are two sides to her, one that is pro-active and fighting to move forward and the other which is self destructive, and you don't know which side will prevail. Ida's moral innocence is counterbalanced by the weight of her aunt's history and life, you are very much aware she had to carry it all by herself and that has made her feel separated from others, unable to truly share who she really is. The person with whom she shared everything, her beloved sister, was brutally murdered. All of this is handled by the director with minimal shooting, that makes you think of the French director Truffaut and Bergman. There is no direct violence, but the sense of war is  strongly felt throughout the movie.The lengthy camera shots, the closeups of the forest, the vast landscape covered in snow, the rattling bones; all is done by association. It is a lyric movie that opens a lot of questions on the history of Poland during the war and about collaboration and antisemitism and it raises questions about faith and living in the material world.

Primo Levi - Photo courtesy of Pinterest

At a certain point the movie made me think of Primo Levi, whose death always troubled me. How can someone of his rigour and discipline, who survived Auschwitz, then die years later at his own hand. 

I always preferred to believe Rita Levi Montalcini's version of events saying he could have just fallen down the staircase of his appartment block in Turin; yes he was on antidepressants, but some people have side effects from them, making them unsteady, dizzy, lowering blood pressure. He could have just simply slipped off by mistake since he had just had surgery and the staircase was rather tight. Anyway, his writing legacy lives on with the masterpiece on Auschwitz 'If This is a Man'.

Photo courtesy of Pinterest

Going back to Ida, it is a powerful, beautiful, minimalist movie that opens up a lot of questions, but I felt that neither woman, Wanda or Ida, was able to overcome their history; they are bound up in it.

From the point of view of an artist, I think I was observing how the film was shot, the shots on the landscape that create a mood, and the beautiful black and white monochrome which I have been using myself lately in my photographs. I have a keen interest in analogue photography, the difference sense of time one gets from using analogue instead of digital, by working in a dark room instead of a computer.