Its frames a cold, beautiful black-and-white, squaring its aesthetic with the drained and spare post-war environment of the Polish People’s Republic, Ida is a stunningly lucid film. Its story, set in the 1960s, is a variation on the theme of the Holocaust as its shadows lingered over the decades that came after it. With the draining of colors and the crisp static shots that populate the film—many of them drenched with a weak, almost weeping window light as though the sunlight itself were sad, broken-down—the director, Pawel Pawlikowski, found the right aesthetic evocative of a time palpably haunted by its past. But while the cinematography is as substantial as that of any other classic black-and-white European art film, and its story a fine variation on a moving (if tried-and-true) historical theme, its final sequences and the mute, affectless behavior of its protagonist do leave something to be desired. And so Ida is an imperfect film that nonetheless satisfies those that don’t mind a spare and slightly cerebral, depressive look at the story of a girl discovering through her past the messy tragedies of the past, highlighted by an aesthetic that can be entrancing.
The story itself is compelling: A novice at a Polish nunnery in the 1960s, a faint, lilting young woman hears from her prioress that she has to visit her last remaining relation, an aunt by the name of Wanda Gruz, before taking her vows and entering the nunnery (for good, as suggested by the prisonlike lifelessness of the cold, dimly lit convent where she’ll live out her years). This aunt, a hard-drinking and promiscuous woman and a former judge, middle-aged, self-destructive and depressed, tells the novice Anna that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, and that her parents were Jews who died during the German occupation of Poland. This slight dialogue opens up the abyss of the past for both women, and after Ida suggests that they go looking for her parents, they head out in a vintage jalopy to do just that, taking the spare road-trip through the Polish countryside as they continue existing in the spare gray light of many thoughtful, limpid frames that alone make the film worthwhile.
While the character of the older woman, played by Agata Kulesza, is subtle and emotive, filled with the depressive weight of past and present, that of the novice nun, played by Agata Trzebuchowska, seems less mysterious and evocative than muted. The final sequences during which she plays out the secular fantasy as a kind of trial-run of what life would be like as a human being (instead of as a nun, a muted human devotee of God), bear out the slight deficiencies of the story, which should have done more with its protagonist. The brief secular hedonism, followed soon by a return to the nun’s habit—it all feels very perfunctory. It is, of course, just a feeling (my feeling), and the story’s deficiencies are slight, in comparison with the beautiful photography and its competent (and, in the case of Agata Kulesza, moving) performances. Ida, all in all, is an imperfect success of a film, and it pays lucid homage to its country’s past, the grand annals of the black-and-white classics, and the rich tradition of European cinema.
