Ida [Region 2]

No Germans appear in the film. They aren’t even talked about, as if their existence had no meaning, as if they were too worthless to think about and mention. But what they did during the war in Poland lingers, the people marked by it. Memories run deep and some wounds will not heal.Anna is a young woman in a convent in Lodz. She’s 19 or 20 and the year is 1961, so perhaps she was born in about 1941. She is chaste and devout, dedicated to God, hers a life of surrender and abstinence. She finds meaning and purpose in the Saviour. From the outside devotion can look like a life wasted. But it’s something lived on the inside where feelings and the spirit reside. Anna is at peace with her life. Or nearly so.She is to take her vows some time in the forthcoming weeks. It’s a big step because once taken they cannot be easily rescinded. The holy vows are a symbolic merging of one’s spirit with God’s.Anna is summonsed by the Mother Superior. Family should be notified before the sacred vows are taken. But Anna has no family. She was brought to the convent as an orphan when she was just a small child, perhaps only a year old. However, the Mother Superior says Anna has an aunt who is still living. The convent has made attempts to contact her, but in vain, their letters unanswered. However, a letter from the aunt has recently arrived. In it the aunt says she does not want to meet Anna.Anna has the address of her aunt. She must go to her before taking her vows.She rides in a tram through the city, her face seen through glass. Reflections on it move across her face: clouds, tree branches, the tops of buildings. She gazes through the window passively, stoically, tranquilly. The world around her is busy but she is quiet within herself, self-contained.She finds the flat of her Aunt Wanda, this person she has never met, the sister of her deceased mother. Wanda has her own life and is not pleased to see her niece. Anna reminds her of another time, a different life now gone. Just as well, as nothing can bring it back. It ended hopelessly, bitterly. Since then life has been a wilful act of forgetting the past.Wanda tells Anna quite matter-of-factly that she’s not Anna but Ida — Ida Lebenstein, a Jew, not the good Catholic Anna thinks she is. But Wanda doesn’t want to discuss details of it. Anna’s parents were murdered. The young son of Wanda as well. They died together. Anna was spared, given to a priest who passed her along to the sisters at the convent orphanage. Anna goes away after this cold reception. She will go to the bus station and take a bus to the village where she and her parents once lived. But before she departs the station Aunt Wanda appears. Out of remorse or pity Wanda has had a change of heart. She and Anna travel in Wanda’s old car to the village. Their detective work into the past begins there.Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker, a young musician named Lis. He is on his way to a nearby town to meet his band who will play for a dance in a local hotel. He plays the alto sax. Four others in the band are these: a guitarist, pianist, drummer and female singer. Lis and his music will have a profound effect on Anna she didn’t see coming.Lis is a lover of Coltrane and jazz. Jazz is the siren song of sin, music made through a sensual and sexual pact with the Devil. Its freedom invites chaos and anarchy; its temptations doom those who embrace it. This is the conservative view.But there’s another view, open and free form, jazz seen as redemption, an invitation to live, and to do it expressively, passionately. Jazz says it’s O.K. to sin, to give way to carnal desires. In fact, to not do it is to truly sin, abstinence a form of death in life. Unlike most humans, the jazzman is alive, deeply rooted in the moment. Like God, he is a creator, his music bringing life into the world. A conceit, surely, but one that feels true in the moment of rapture when the music becomes transcendent.Anna will be mesmerised by it and Lis.Aunt Wanda goes to the dance. It’s in a downstairs restaurant at the hotel where she and Anna are staying. She drinks, smokes, flirts, dances, kisses a stranger at the bar. She is what’s known as a loose woman. She was once respectable, whatever that means. She was a judge and public prosecutor who sent men to their deaths after the war. But now she looks back cynically at that time. Now she seeks oblivion in causal sex and stimulants, a haze of incoherence glossing over the ugliness of the world. The dichotomy is thus made explicit: Anna saint, Wanda sinner. Yet complexity of character forms the beauty of the film (or one of its beauties), not simplicity. On this journey of discovery both Anna and Wanda will change.The opening scenes of the film show Anna at the convent painting the face of Christ with a small brush. The Saviour is a plaster statue made by the nuns and he will be carried by them into the snowy courtyard of the convent and placed on a pedestal, not a cross. Like the Redeemer in Rio, he will stand tall and bless the world.Where does her artistic talent come from? It comes from her mother. Anna learns this from Wanda. Her mother once made a beautiful stained glass window for the cowshed on their farm. It served no reasonable purpose. The cows could not appreciate its beauty. But her sister, Anna’s mother, said it would make them happy whether they thought about it or not. Beauty is like that somehow. It stirs something inside that makes us notice the happy way the world can look. We needn’t think anything. Just feel. Were the cows sentient beings too? Did they feel something special? Anna’s mother thought they did.Christ’s face, beauty, faith, redemption. Somehow these are connected for Anna. Add to it jazz and sensuality. If she is to take her vows, they will come only after she explores more of herself and the nature of the world. Music for her will open that door.The film was shot in monochrome, not colour. Normally the world is like a rainbow because the colours in it blend together. Black-and-white is different, the edges sharp, the divide between each clean. It’s why black-and-white looks so stark. Everything is clear, stands out. It is chaste and austere too, the world drained of colour. No coincidence as well, perhaps, that nuns dress in black and white, life reduced to a raw simplicity where choices are easier to see and make.There is much on the journey of Anna and Wanda that can be described. But it’s better here to say less. The film is what matters, not a review of it. However, I will say it’s extraordinary. It has the look and feel of a classic. Think Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer. The film has won several awards, including an Academy Award, and was voted no. 55 on a list of the best films of the 21st century by 177 film critics around the world. At only 80 minutes it may feel too short, but through expert editing the film is dense with images, impressions, emotions. A mature work of art from a director (Pawel Pawlikowski) at the peak of his powers. Five stars is the Amazon limit, but in truth it deserves more.

War orphan Agata Trzebuchowska was raised in a Polish convent. A week before taking her vows in 1962, she learns that she’s Jewish. With estranged aunt Agata Kulesza, she searches for her parents’ gravesite. Coming at the Holocaust from an oblique angle, Pawel Pawlikowski’s delicately constructed time machine is a haunting work of austere beauty and quiet devastation. Framed like paintings in a Dutch master’s gallery, this perfectly formed footnote to the likes of Fateless, In the Fog, and Schindler’s List is a film so pure and simple it reaffirms faith in the transformative power of cinema. Like young saxophonist Dawid Ogrodnik says, musing on what he expects from the future: “The usual. Life.” Immaculately composed, Ida is a little miracle of a film. It takes the breath away even as it fully engages mind, body and soul with its clarity and purity of purpose.

Understated, to a fault at times, the story nevertheless draws you in following the young woman Anna who has lived her life in a convent, and wants to take hers vows to become a nun. Before she can do this, she is told by the mother superior to visit her only relative, an aunt, who she has never seen.The following drama that slowly unfolds is fascinating and moving, although there is no sentimentality here, it’s quite a cold hard story about Poland still in the aftermath of the Second World War, set in the early sixties. The monochrome cinematography reinforces the bleakness of the scenes. It’s very minimalist with not a lot of talking, and a lot can be inferred by the slightest movement or act. It’s also short in length at 1 hr 22min.Unfortunately the English sub-titles do get in the way a bit, and I couldn’t always tell who was talking but a swift rewind helped me out.

A superb film. Excellent storyline, unfolding very subtly and presented with considerable cinematographic skill. Depicting a period of history, and the need for forgiveness in its aftermath, which I doubt we shall ever have the emotional capacity to achieve again.Beautiful performances, maintaining an air of mystery throughout.Don't be put off by the pedants who moan about the subtitles. That's only an issue for a few minutes and they could always watch this section twice with and without them. To the rest of us it's just a damned good film.

A short but densely packed film, every scene, and word and gesture, loaded with meaning. Ida is a beautifully understated role, a novice nun, whose innocence will be shattered, but Wanda's bitter experience and quiet desparation is the story which will remain with you. From meaningless sexual encouters, to alcoholism and self neglect, her life unravels before you during the crazy chicanes in her clapped out car as she searches for the remains of her sister and her son. Task completed, there could perhaps be only one fitting end.

So there's this nun, and her Mother Superior tells her to go and find her self.Yeah, I know it starts like Sounds of Music, but that's where the resemblance ends.Ida goes and finds her only living relative, her mother's sister, only to find out, that her parents were Jews.That's how it starts, and I'll tell you no more.It's not one of the movies, that will warm your heart, but it's not a movie that's easily forgotten.So I would recommend this movie, if you feel like watching "something else".

Holocaust films generally make grim viewing, but well done they are a valuable addition to the 'historical' record. In this case the thorny issue of who benefited from the round up, and eventual extermination, of the Polish Jewry, and the absence of any post war reparation, is dealt with.