By Doris Toumarkine
Polish-born, U.K.-based and educated filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s much-applauded
Ida, which Music Box Films released last spring and is Poland’s bid for an Oscar foreign-language nomination, got a special screening and Q&A time afterwards with Pawlikowski Sunday night at downtown New York’s Soho House. With Music Box exec Ed Arentz also in attendance, the event was no doubt intended to keep deserved awareness and award hopes alive for the film, especially when you’re in competition among 82 other countries for the Academy’s handful of final nominations.
Set in a grim Communist Poland in the early 60s and co-written by the director and Rebecca Lenkiewicz,
Ida is about 18-year-old orphan and novitiate nun Anna (newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska) who, about to take her vows, is first sent to visit her Aunt Wanda (Agneta Kulesza, delivering a remarkable performance), a cynical and dissolute Communist Party adherent, her one living relative. Suggesting the wounded Holocaust survivor that she is, Wanda is living a reckless life.
She informs Anna that she was born Ida and is Jewish. What follows is their journey into the town’s wartime past as they learn of Ida’s parents’ tragic end and are led to their remains buried in a ditch. Here, suspense begins for audiences about Anna and the path she’ll take and further heightened when she shows interest in a local young musician. Will Anna forgo her vows and embrace her true identity as the Jewish Ida? And Wanda, sinking deeper into depression, has her arc.
Coming from the world of documentaries, Pawlikowski’s film, his fourth theatrical fiction feature (the Kristin Scott Thomas/Ethan Hawke starrer
The Woman in the Fifth was the most recent), is distinguished by its deliberate low-key approach. Presented in black-and-white,
Ida offers stark and authentic star settings framed by the retro 1.33 screen ratio.
In her debut, Trzebuchowska, who delivers a moving performance, is given very little dialogue; emotional feelings are left to her innocent face, which some may perceive as more suggestive of Slavic than Jewish. Pawlikowski said finding his Anna/Ida was “tough” but luck stepped in. A colleague of his spotted her in a café and tipped her to the film. Keeping alive the Schwab drugstore legend of star discovery but with an intermediary’s intervention, the filmmaker thus found his heroine.
Above all, Trzebuchowska is brave indeed in dealing with the camera. And suggesting the wisdom of those who know to quit while ahead, she told the filmmaker that she has no further acting ambitions.
Ida really is a pile-up of important themes (the Holocaust, politics, identity, etc.) but Pawlikowski is more after an experience for his audiences.
Ida’s finale recalls the memorable endings of past classics like
Knife in the Water,
The Third Man and
400 Blows. For all these films, it’s that slow-burning but ultimately powerful consummation of all that transpired — on a human level — before.
The nostalgic feel of the film aside, therein lies the film’s main attraction. As Pawlikowski suggested during the Q&A, exploration of matters religious, political, historical, ethical or even familial weren’t his real concern. Best to leave the heavy lifting to viewers, he suggested, saying, “I tried to tell the audience that they’re not going to get the full picture. The film is more meditation than story.”
He went on to explain that “political films tend to simplify things. My mission was to show how strange and paradoxical life is.” His goal was for
Ida to be “a cinematic experience about human beings rather than an issue-driven film.” And so it is.
Ida began years ago as just an idea he had. What gave it initial traction was that he had always wanted to make a film with a character like Wanda, his complex, tortured Holocaust survivor in the early years of Poland’s Communism. Implied is that it was the horrible wartime experiences that drove her ardently to Communism, which in turn drove her off the rails. But that may be getting too historical and political.
What really sticks is the film’s nostalgic look and sound (old pop songs identified with that period in Europe but also fragments from Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, a Pawlikowski favorite).
The filmmaker said the film’s look was inspired by his family photo albums. Because he wanted a strong picture more than a beautiful one, “we didn’t do coverage…we even cut some shots because they were too beautiful.”
And let film backers beware: “We kept changing the script, so it’s much different from what we raised money on.” The script, he further observes, feels graceful because it came from many changes. “I don’t trust scripts.” Most of the material was rehearsed but, showing his documentary roots, Pawlikowski offered that “you mold film as you go along.”
Ida is a compact 80 minutes and wound down its theatrical run this summer flirting with a $4 million box office for the U.S. Now with the film’s team and filmmaker’s native country of Poland crossing fingers that
Ida can consummate a love affair with Oscar, they await the final list of Foreign-Language nominations.
