Soon before getting her confirmation as a Catholic nun, Anna is sent by the principal to visit her aunt. Wanda - or ´the red Wanda´ as she used to be called - was a communist judge in Poland with a history of ideological ´orthodoxy´. She will let Anna know that she is actually Jewish: Ida Lebenstein, the daughter of Haim Lebenstein and Roza Herc. ´You are also a Jewish nun´, Wanda will add sarcastically but his niece is barely showing any exterior surprise. Together, they embark on a journey through a winter-frozen country searching for their place of burial.
Ida´s reaction hearing the news about her ancestry and the fate of her parents is numb. Her religious attachment to her Catholic faith is expressed sometimes through mechanical gestures, typical for someone not having anything and anyone left besides Gd. She is the perfect opposite of her aunt, enjoying suicidally any drop of life - and alcohol as well.
The encounter between the two women and the Polish villagers who were supposed to protect and save their family is one of the film´s most dramatic moments. This dramatic encounter should be an episode putting on trial Ida´s faith. The peasant´s son, while getting a verbal deal from them of showing the place of burial in exchange of giving up any claim to the house he and his family took over, is revealing another tragic truth: He decided to send Ida to the monastery, as she was the less ´Jewish looking´ from her family. Wanda´s son - that she left in the care of her sister to join the partisans - was dark haired and circumcised thus was not left alive and sent to death with an axe. (It is not expected Gd, not the humans, to decide ´who will live, and who will die´?)
Ida will not had has confirmation actually, not when she was supposed to, and her aunt will be able to carry the weight of the tragic end of her family. But it is only an episode of her life, it seems.
I haven´t like so much in a while a movie on such a sensitive topic. It is a relatively short movie - less than one hour and a half - filmed completely in black-and-white. The women actresses are excellent in their roles - the naive versus the deeply tormented soul. The musical background - jazz and loud classical music - as well as the infinite nakedness of the Polish winter are the best companion of the long silences between the characters. The film Ida breathes an elaborated simplicity the result of a tremendous work of reframing and reassigning scripts and images.
It´s the everyday life simplicity of the evil, the human duplicity, the refuse to accept the black-and-white simplifications - except in the construction of the images, which give a dramatic complexity to the visual story in its entirety. Indeed, this film is a masterpiece, and its long list of awards it received - among which Best Foreign Language Film of Academy Awards and a Golden Globe - is well deserved.
The story is not unique to Poland, where at least 3 million Jews were murdered during the Shoah. I´ve heard so often in the last years about people, including members of the Catholic clergy, discovering their Jewish roots. Some will leave their past behind, some will go on with their life as usual. The ways in which Poland acknowledged their responsibility towards their Jewish citizens and neighbours it´s a very sad story which deserves more than a blog post.
The film director, Pawel Pawlikowski discovered in his late teens that his paternal grandmother was killed in Auschwitz. Raised Catholic, he is known for his documentary movies.
Rating: 5 stars
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