Learning devastating truths can be daunting. Experiencing the unnerving discovery of post-war realities in as spare yet vivid a manner as presented in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida verges on breathtaking. Pawlikowski shoots in black-and-white, uses an almost square screen format, has long stretches without dialogue, and forces the viewer to focus intently on the micro reactions of his two main characters. Watching lead actress Agata Trzebuchowksa is like listening to a Terry Riley minimalist music piece–the heightened sameness almost seems redundant until–wait!, there’s a change. Ida’s face often appears locked into a certain expression. Look closer….The smallest change is magnified by the austere setting of her introspective stillness. There is more going on in Trzebuchowska’s countenance (she’s previously a completely untrained actress) than in a score of over-emoting professionals.
Anna is a novitiate nun near Lodz, Poland, ready to take her lifetime vows. Her mother superior suggests she first pay a visit to her lone surviving relative, an estranged aunt, Wanda. Wanda (veteran Polish actress Agata Kulesza) seems cold to Anna at first. Jaded, resolute, cynical–she’s ostensibly hardly a neutral role model for Anna’s probable last glimpse into the outside world. As a judge by profession, she does, however, possess a gutsy persistence and proves to be the effective guide in Anna finding out her parents’ fate in the war. Anna, you see, is not Anna at all, Wanda informs her. She’s Ida Lebenstein and she’s Jewish.
Guilt, pain, transformation, survival, loss–they’re all here. The melancholy yet luminous casting of these themes in miniature gives the film a quiet, spiritual economy that will likely stick with you long after viewing it. Its use of Mozart and Coltrane as musical bookshelves provides further contrast in what is essentially a yin and yang character study. Wanda not only chain smokes, regularly swigs vodka, and seeks the company of men–professionally she is know as the former prosecutor, “Red Wanda,” who sent enemies of the Polish communist state to their death. Yet the complexity of her familial duty shows an almost offhand compassion.
Ida will go on to meet a gentler, kinder representative of the secular world but not before uncovering the secrets of her family’s past. Her voyage may be a simple one, as lean and sublime as this film itself. It stuns with simplicity, resounds with eternal questions. Pawlikowski weaves a magical, deeply meditative spell. Trzebuchowksa is purely magnificent.