For his latest film Pawel
Pawlikowski returns to his native Poland for what is probably his most powerful
film to date Ida (2013), following two English language films Last
Resort (2000) and My Summer of
Love (2004) and the predominantly French language film which stared Kristin
Scott Thomas The
Woman in the Fifth (2012).
As far as Anna knows she has no
family, having been brought up in a convent. Called into the Mother Superiors
office she is told that a living relative has come forward and before she takes
her final vows she should go and meet the women. Her dead mothers sister Wanda
is a good-looking middle-aged lady with no family of her own. She was employed
as a judge in political trials during the Soviet Stalin regime, which gave her
power over life and death. She is now a very bitter woman, a heavy smoker with
a drink habit that borders alcoholism. Her causal sex life consists of
one-night stands. Into this life steps the young novitiate nun who has never
been out of the close confines of the Catholic convent. But it's the secrets that date back to the
time of the Second World War that her aunt has too impart that's shocks Anna,
learning that even her name is not her own, originally being given the name Ida!
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| Is Anna, the novitiate nun, ready to take her vows? |
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| Her sadly beautiful Aunt imparts secrets that could change her life forever! |
This intimate road trip into the
secrets of the past is beautifully composed in black and white by Ryszard
Lenczewski who has worked with the director on his previous body of work. His
scenes are 'bottom weighted', by that I mean that although a scene would fill
the square frame format, the characters heads and shoulders would appear at the
bottom, said by the director to give them ‘grounding’.
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| Family relationships are not always easy. |
Filmed in the Lodzkie district of
Poland and set in the early 1960's, it paints the urban landscape as a bleak,
cold and austere place, a place that has never come to terms with the
devastation brought on by the war. Newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska intimately
plays the role of Anna/Ida, with the great Polish actress Agata Kuleska playing
her aunt, who if your are a regular at the EIFF would have seen her in two
great movies Roza (2011) and Traffic
Department (2013),
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| This Polish road movie asks questions of us all! |
This cheerless but ‘masterful evocation of intimate dilemmas and
the weight of history’[1] raises
many questions about the fundamental meaning of life! It goes some way to give
us an incite in to the relationship between the Catholic Poles and the Jews, it
makes us question our belief in the decency of mankind, who are saints and who are
the sinners? In Ida’s case will she be tempted not to take her vows avoiding a
closed life of worship. Is there more to life than sin and happy families? If
like many other Polish films this will probably not get a wide release, which is
a great shame.
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