★★★★★
Five Stars
What’s in a name? That’s the question confronted by Ida’s protagonist, a young nun named Anna. On the eve of making her vows, she is sent from her convent to meet her aunt, a depressed former prosecutor for Poland’s socialist regime. Her only surviving relative, she reveals that Anna is in fact named Ida, a Jewish name hidden alongside the fate of her parents, who perished mysteriously during the Holocaust. Together they set out to find their family’s final resting place, and to deal with the pain of their collective past.
Shot in cold black and white, it is a resolutely melancholic film, but it’s an honest one, and it maintains a dry humour in the face of its bleak subject. “A Jewish Nun!”, several characters incredulously remark, while her atheist aunt enjoys goading her for her piousness, particularly after they’re joined in their car by a handsome saxophone player.
At first a passive protagonist, Ida’s light grey habit and matching coat lend her a spectral quality, broken only by her black, saucer-like eyes. She drifts across the snow covered ground, watching, listening, and eventually confronting the horrors of her past. The more she comes to understand about the world, the more she observes it with a quiet disappointment. Through her gaze we see the cruelties of our world afresh, and through her actions we see the compromises we make to survive.
A splash of dark mud on Ida’s light grey coat. Can she return to the scrubbed walls and silent corridors of the convent, or is she now caught in the wreckage of post-war Poland? The film contrasts the hopelessness of the aunt, caught in the past, with Ida’s concern for her own future. What will it mean to be Ida, and what has become of Anna?
In the stunning final sequence, Ida literally steps into a new identity, and realises the empty future it promises her.
Agata Trzebuchowska is a silent revelation in the role, every emotion registering in a slight tilt of her head, a downcasting of those eyes. We are made to watch, as Ida’s curious optimism slowly gives way to confusion and disappointment, before finally hardening into a resolute determination. In this way, Trzebuchowska effectively contrasts Ida’s burgeoning independence with her childlike inexperience.
Ida’s static camerawork imbues the film with a meditative stillness. The tableau-like monochromatic images capture the exhaustion of a post-war world which offers lots of regrets but few new beginnings. The painterly compositions place the characters at the edges of the frames, small, isolated, inhabiting a world they’re powerless to change.
The film has been described as a throwback to the glory days of the art house, its aspect ratio and gorgeous black and white photography recalling the works of the European Auteurs. Whilst certainly reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece, Persona, both in its plotting and its exploration of the intersection of people’s identities, Ida is a film about humans and history, not ideas.
Its closest cousin is perhaps last year’s brilliant A Coffee in Berlin, a similarly personal look at a Europe still haunted by the ghosts of World War II.
Ida is captivating and artful, fascinating and emotional, a film brimming with observations and style, which only ever serve the heart wrenching human story at its fore.
It is a film about identities, both personal and collective, but fundamentally, it is the story of a young woman trying to define herself. What, then, is there in a name? Whatever you want there to be.
