IDA: New Film from Poland
Some stories can only be told in a quiet voice.
“Ida” is a new film from Poland. It is shot in black and white and its brief tale unfolds in a series of almost static shots. It has, at times, all the quiet beauty of a Vermeer only with an austereness that is more reminiscent of Dreyer’s “Jeanne D’Arc.” (Wow, two references in one sentence–I can put my Pauline Kael books away for a day or so.)
The film, in its brief but memorable 80 minutes, does something few films ever have: makes the historical personal. Without any histrionics or finger-pointing, this film tells the story of Poland as it passed through Nazi occupation and into the reign of Communism.
It is the early 1960s and Anna is on her way to becoming a nun. She leaves her frozen in time monastery to visit her aunt, whom she has never met. Her aunt, it turns out, was once a high ranking criminal prosecutor who, as she says with a less than amused grin, has, in the past, sent several men to their deaths in political trials. The aunt now seems to spend her time chain-smoking, drinking, picking up men, and presiding over trials concerning minor property damage.
In short order the aunt tells this young woman that she is not named Anna, but Ida, and that she may well be a Catholic now but she was born to a Jewish family and therefore is Jewish. Ida will also come to learn, in a scene in which the past is metaphorically and literally excavated in quiet horror, that her family did not merely die during the war but were murdered, and they don’t have a nice, neat funeral plot to visit.
There are no speeches in this film, little music, no action. The characters don’t even explore the boundaries of the screen–rarely does anyone walk into or out of a frame or walk to or away from the camera. While there are two grim scenes, not much happens in “Ida” but in its own way, we are shown a great deal of what has happened in the past and how that past is always with Ida and her aunt, and us.
I will remember this film.
