Pawlikowski: Ida (2014)

Other films may depict the atrocities of the Holocaust in more detail, but few capture its existential burden as concisely and cosmically as Ida. Set in 1962 in the Polish People’s Republic, it’s about a young novitiate, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) who’s about to take her vows when her Mother Superior suggests that she pay a visit to a nearby town to visit Wanda (Agata Trebusza), her aunt and only living relative. Anna hasn’t seen Wanda, who now works as a prostitute, since she was handed over to the nunnery as a young girl, and yet it’s only a matter of time before Wanda reveals to her that her name is actually Ida, and that they are the sole surviving members of the Lebensteins, a Jewish family murdered during the Holocaust. In order to come to terms with her past, Anna – now Ida – joins Wanda in a journey back to their home town to confront the Polish farmers who may have been responsible for the fate of their family. That might sound like quite a visceral, cathartic story, but Pawlikowski chooses to shoot it in quite a meek manner, as if cautious to express too much, or to be too indiscreet about his subject matter. Great stretches of it could play a silent film, partly because Ida herself hardly ever speaks – and, when she does speak, is purely reactive – while Pawlikwoski’s old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio makes each shot feel like a convent, cloister or cell, reducing the sounds of the outside world to the barest of murmurs. Like Ida, then, the film feels poised at the threshold of taking vows, rendering its austerity particularly breathtaking and bracing – sensual, even – but also distilling the Holocaust to a challenge to faith – both Christian and Jewish – not least because of how elegantly and elliptically Pawlikowski reminds us that it was a religious genocide as well as a racial genocide, a clash between Christian and Jew as well as a clash between Aryan and Jew. For that reason, the early 60s backdrop seems crucial – just close enough to the Holocaust that it’s still in living memory, and all the anonymous perpetrators and casual bystanders have returned to the daily lives of the communities they helped deplete, but just distant enough that the catastrophe has been more or less legally and administratively resolved, leaving the sheer incomprehensibility and unimaginability of it to haunt the sites where it occurred. In that sense, Pawlikowski’s long, still shots – never reposed or composed enough to allow you to sink into any kind of contemplative peace – are a bit like the voids and wells of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, places where representation breaks down, leaving postures, movements and patterns that are purely ceremonial. As the film proceeds, Anna and Wanda feel more and more like the last people left on earth – people who should, by all accounts, be dead – as Pawlikowski makes it clear that their only options are to assimilate back into waking life or self-destruct. Yet the film also proceeds by converging those two options as well, until there’s no real difference between awaking from the film’s stunned stupor and sinking even deeper into it, in what must be one of the most agonising and existential tributes to Holocaust survival ever committed to film.