Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, if anything, is far more of a painting than a film.
Set in 1961 Poland, the film’s tale is a simple one: Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), an 18-year-old novitiate nun, is told to visit her last living relative before taking official orders from her Mother Superior.
Upon meeting her aunt Wanda (played brilliantly by veteran Polish stage and film actress Agata Kulesza), Anna is dismissed by the middle-aged woman with the wave of incredulity: “You’re a Jew,” Wanda abruptly tells her. “A Jewish nun.” This is the beginning of the antithetical relationship between the two: the alcoholic, intellectual powerhouse that is Wanda, always poking fun at the beautiful naïveté of Anna, and the faithful, devout Anna who is always thinking far more than she speaks.
The revelation that Anna was born Ida Lebenstein is proof that for many, blood is the bind that ties and she desperately wants to visit her parents’ graves. “They have no graves,” Wanda coldly says. “Neither they, nor any other Jews.”
This is the first part of the film where Pawlikowski shows off his largest strength: avoiding postmodern tropes that pervade contemporary filmmaking when it comes to telling the many tales of WWII and post-WWII Europe, Ida shows very little—which is precisely what lends to its power. It never shows a direct scene of violence, never speaks of violence directly; rather, it is subtly shown off in the bleakness of its environment. If anything, it is one of the most humanist pictures in recent history, harkening to the work of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky, where long, unmoving shots force audience members to sink into an environment that seems altogether otherworldly yet down-to-earth.
This juxtaposition—alien and native—define’s Pawlikowski’s (and his brilliant cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s) Poland in Ida. This Poland, in stark contrast to contemporary Poland, looks like the walking dead, a lifeless yet slow moving place where one is unsure of what world they are in.
It harkens to the powerful testimony of Jean Améry, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps, and the concept of the Muselmann. In a disturbing facet of camp captivity, Améry noted that the Jewish populations sorted their own into hierarchies—and the lowest of the low was the Muselmann. These creatures were not quite human, having been driven to scavengers of the camp, caring little for what little hygiene there was and even less for their fellow kind. Their bodies, driven to a zombie-like state, folded their backs to a hump as they weakly meandered with no human attachment. From far away, their humped-spines made them look like a praying Muslim, hence Muselmann.
Poland, in this sense, is still strangely surviving with no humanity: an in-between, even hinted at through Pawlikowski’s perpetual shooting style of his characters, which are rarely centered or fill the screen but rather sunken to the bottom with vast scenery taking up the majority of frame. Poland has lost a fifth of its population and following the Communist take over through Stalin, its survivors knew—silently—that they only reason they survived was by betrayal.
The schism between life and death, loyalty and betrayal, is always present in the film and, even more, lingers between the differing philosophies of Wanda and Anna. Wanda—far too analytical to ever lie to anyone after having sentenced her own Poles to death while she was a judge—can’t seem to pin down her own identity as Poland becomes a specter more than a tangible thing. Anna, on the other hand, holds two identities: that of the Catholic nun and that of the Jew—and she is unable to reconcile the two. Back at the convent, the unrelenting battle inside her own head culminates in a prostration on the floor of her room, repenting for sins that haven’t even occurred.
Philosopher Giorgio Agamben theorized that the only way for us to examine atrocity is through the witnesses who have experienced it at its most extreme—in this case, through the Muselmann, the walking dead. Perhaps this is what Pawlikowski was aiming for: to force us to sit within a space and with a nation that is barely clinging on and has lost any sense of identity so that, perhaps, we can find an identity ourselves and bear witness to the unfolding of humans yearning to create a better world with one another.
And despite the heavy amount of history inferred, Ida ultimately isn’t a film about Poland or the Holocaust or European Judaism or Stalinism. It’s about identity—and just how rocky, unstable, and viciously tormenting identity is and can be when faced with the past.
Ida begins tomorrow at the Art Theatre, located at 2025 E 4th Street. For tickets, click here.