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| The Agatas ask a lot of questions in Ida. |
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Ida. Written by Pawel Pawlikowski & Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Directed by Pawel
Pawlikowski. At selected theaters. (In Polish w/ English subtitles)
Things are looking up in Poland
recently. Of all the former Soviet satellites, Poland is widely regarded as a
success story. Its economic and political example is one of the biggest (and under-reported)
reasons why the people of Western Ukraine threw out their Kremlin puppet and
aligned with Europe. For Poland—a nation that vanished from the map more than
once in the last few centuries—to serve as inspiration to anyone is faintly
miraculous.
But as Pawel Pawlikowski 's lovely Ida shows, the ghosts of the nation's recent past aren't so easily left
behind. The script by Pawlikowski and
Rebecca Lenkiewicz focuses on the
original sin of 20th century Poland: the German occupation during
WWII, when the nation's Jews were all but annihilated by the Nazis, sometimes
(but not always) with the connivance of the Poles themselves.
A generation after the war, under the
Communists, young Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice about to take her vows
as a nun. Before taking that momentous step, she is instructed by her mother
superior to visit Wanda, her aunt and only living relative. Wanda (Agata Kulesza) is a court judge with a hanging reputation
and a habit of partying hard and drinking harder. She pointedly refused to
take custody of Ida as a child, which makes for some awkwardness as her adult
niece makes contact with her for the first time. But that's nothing compared to
what Wanda blurts just a few minutes after their meeting: Ida, the aspiring nun,
is actually Jewish. Her parents—including Wanda's sister—disappeared under
mysterious circumstances during the war.
As Pawlikowski and Lenkiewicz show, there was little taste
for digging up recent history in Poland during the Communist era. Commemorating
the crimes of the Fascists had a certain propaganda value, but of recalling
Polish complicity—let alone Soviet war crimes—there was not much of an upside.
Wanda, suppressing her first instinct to send her niece packing, helps her
learn the whereabouts of her parents. They're a very odd couple indeed, the worldly
judge and the beatific novice, as they travel the countryside, asking questions
the locals would prefer not to hear.
Ida
is a practically perfect piece of work. Shot in limpid black and white, it is a
concerto for two instruments suggesting great depth beneath its spare surface. The
Agatas are from different halves of the universe, Trzebuchowska
with a dignity livened by an Eve-like sensual curiosity, Kulesza with a moral
despair Roman Polanski would appreciate, and sigh over.
It's only practically perfect because it bites off more than it can chew
about an era much more ambitious films have failed to rationalize. Pawlikowski
raises questions about the Poles who initially helped Ida's family hide from
the Nazis that he never bothers to answer. In a film where the words
"Nazi" and "German" are barely uttered, that's a heavy
burden of guilt to place on the Poles, if only by default. With the film
running only eighty minutes, there seems to have been plenty of time for it to
make its moral case clearer.
Pawlikowski gets one big thing right,
however: for too long, it served the purposes of both the Communists and
certain anti-Semitic Poles to make Poland seem like nothing more than a Jewish
graveyard. His Ida is a fictional reflection of a real phenomenon among young Poles,
thousands of whom are rediscovering their hidden or forgotten Jewish roots. For
them, the Holocaust is becoming something that happened not to a distant and
extinct "them", but to a living, breathing "us".
©
2014 Nicholas Nicastro
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