IDA.  DIR. PAWEL PAWLIKOWSKI. 2013

Cinematography:

Paweł Pawlikowski and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, shot Ida in black and white, utilizing the boxy dimensions of a 4:3 aspect ratio while often positioning the main characters towards the bottoms and sides of the frame.  By using this frame and typically filming the characters from a single angle with a static camera, the director makes us feel as if the image on the screen could stand alone and be described as a picture might. Pawlikowski allows the viewers to decide for themselves what they think of the characters.  He poses the questions, but does not supply the answers.

Ida is the most silent character in the film, but also the most complex. In her silence, there is implied pensiveness. As Ida is walking away from the convent to go and visit her aunt, she is positioned in the lower right corner of the screen with the convent behind her and the snow falling all around her.  The camera lingers on the unchanging image of the convent, indifferent to Ida’s presence or absence, much less to the magnitude of the journey she is beginning.  Ida looks small compared to the big world she must enter.  She is rarely shown through conventional medium shots or close-ups. Ida is almost always positioned to the side, in the corner of the frame, or just a part of her body is filmed.  Light seems to fixate on Ida.  It strikes her directly and seldom leaves her, as though she possesses luminosity, whereas Wanda is often masked in shadow.  This lighting suggests Ida’s innocence and seeming godliness while simultaneously emphasizing the darkness that consumes Wanda.

The emotionally charged scene in the hospital where Ida and Wanda visit the farmer in search of answers further illustrates the difference between the two protagonists, revealing more of Wanda’s emotions and eliciting more initiative and action from Ida.  Wanda begins to question the farmer, and asks him about her son and whether he was scared when he died, believing that this man had killed her son with an axe.  He does not respond, a silence that Wanda takes as an affirmative, and she looks down.  During this terrible moment the audience can only see the top half of her face and is forced to imagine Wanda’s reaction, as Ida holds her and helps her get up.

The forest scene, in which Ida and Wanda follow the farmer’s son in search of the remains of their perished loved ones, likewise veils or refracts the characters’ emotions.  As they are watching the farmer dig up the bodies, we see Ida and Wanda on the left side of the screen staring stoically. We do not see what they are staring at, but the audience can assume they are watching the man, and they seem rather affectless for two people about to obtain the bones of their loved ones.  As the man continues to dig, Ida on the right side of the screen is only seen with the left half of her face in the shot.  Again, the audience is forced to intuit what these characters are only partially revealing.

By employing a 4:3 ratio and filming largely static shots,  Pawlikowski and Żal make the audience feel as if we are glimpsing the characters through a window or in a photograph.   The beauty of the cinematography is that it breaks away from the conventional mold of the modern action film.  What makes Ida special is that it affords us the freedom to form our own opinions, to ponder both the film’s visual style and its dialogue, and ultimately, to delve into the characters on our own.

The controversy over critics’ charges of Ida’s supposed anti-Catholicism and stereotyping of the Jewish communist:

This film does not present an exposé of the Catholic Church; Ida is certainly not abused by the church in her training to become a nun. The movie is not about who the good guys or the bad guys are. It presents a story about a family seeking the truth about their past. It shows how the journey that Ida and Wanda take together transforms them in different ways. Scenes with look of confusion and worry dominated the film. These emotions resulted from Ida’s lack of true identity and the difficulty she and Wanda face in resolving their issues and coming to terms with their past.

The film’s representation of the Catholic Church evolves as Ida must explore her new identity.  The beginning of the film shows Ida painting a statue of Jesus for the convent, eating dinner with the nuns, and talking to the Mother Superior about contacting her family before she takes her vows. These scenes show the nuns as Ida’s family and the convent as her safe haven. Though the viewer can immediately tell how disempowered Ida is, she seems content with her life, and does not want to leave to find her aunt. Ida’s attachment to the convent lessens over the course of the film, and the young girl who we first see painting the face of Jesus ultimately experiments with worldly pleasures that she once would have condemned as sins.

The scene in which I most noticed a negative portrayal of the Catholic Church is when Ida is  talking to the jazz player. Because of the characters movements and setting, we can sense that they are  beginning to fall for each other and the notion of innocent love is touched upon. There is very obvious chemistry, but Ida must refrain herself from acting upon her impulses because of her position in the  Convent. The jazz player then criticizes the Church, as he likens taking vows to joining the army. The scene in which the farmer’s son sits in the grave in which he buried Ida and Wanda’s family and  confesses that he killed them might be misinterpreted as a form of criticism, as the farmer’s son was  Catholic and not only appropriated property that belonged to a Jewish family during the war, but also committed murder to reach that point. Additionally, his Catholic wife has the audacity to ask Ida for her blessing when Ida and Wanda go searching for their family’s graves, even though the wife is sure to know that her husband had something to do with the family murder. Such an interpretation would fail to take into account, however, that such atrocities were not exclusive to people of any single religion during that time (although admittedly Catholicism was prominent in Poland) – they were human attributes credited to the farmer’s son as a symbol of how people that were not being directly persecuted during the war managed to survive, and the dark times that sometimes led them to perform unspeakable acts out of greed, anger, or fear.

While some critics perceive a defaming stereotype of a Jewish communist in the person of “Bloody” Wanda, Pawlikowski’s presentation of her character is anything but a condemnation. The Wanda first introduced to the audience is more worthy of our denunciation than our sympathy, but the only way to fully understand the complexity of her character is to put yourself in her shoes and imagine the struggles and traumas of her life. Wanda’s negative personality traits result not from a Jewish identity that she had abandoned long before the events of the film, but from her difficult past and the communist identity she vehemently embraced as a shield against guilt and pain.

The film initially characterizes Wanda as a woman who chain smokes, drinks too much, and sleeps around with men.  In contrast to the conservative and careful Ida, Wanda appears to be scandalous and unrestricted. Their first appearances in the film illustrate this difference. In the opening scene of the movie, Ida is painting a statue of Jesus and then carries it with several other novices to its pedestal before the convent. The atmosphere in this scene is peaceful and pristine, the color balance mostly a pure white created by the falling snow.  When Ida first meets Wanda, she walks down a corridor that becomes progressively darker. Ida stands outside the doorway to Wanda’s apartment next to the stairs, and the scene is very dark and primarily black. Wanda is curt in her conversation when she opens her door and seems anything but welcoming.

Yet over the course of Wanda and Ida’s journey, the audience comes to understand that Wanda’s abrasive manner veils pain.  The only way that Wanda can drown out her sorrows and remain in control of the emotions that threaten to ravage her inside is to cut herself off from the past, including her connection to Ida.  She turns to sex, vodka, and cigarettes as welcome distractions and coping mechanisms. The scene that first reveals Wanda’s great pain occurs after they confront the farmer’s father about the death of their family.  When she learns of the death of her son, the audience is given its first glimpse of Wanda with her walls down; she is depicted crying in Ida’s arms on the restroom floor.  While the crying itself is enough to humanize her character, the fact that she seeks the comfort of someone else, the most simple of human reactions, reveals the depth of her sorrow.

Other scenes deepen our understanding of Wanda’s complexity.  When the two women exhume and then rebury their family’s remains,“Bloody” Wanda’s reactions suggest that she herself is a victim of the war, with deep ties buried in its aftermath. As the farmer’s son is digging up the grave, the camera captures a close-up of her mid-section as she cradles the scarf-enveloped skull of her son.  Dispensing with conventional close-up shots of faces in emotionally charged moments, the focus on Wanda’s stomach in this moment of tragedy reveals an under-the-surface investment, a corporal and visceral pain that drives her away from the scene, literally carrying the tragedy that she unearthed. Just as the bones of the dead languish in the earth, so too does a profound and unrelenting grief fester beneath Wanda’s stolid façade.  And when Wanda and Anna sit in a car discussing their family and the graves that they didn’t receive, Pawlikowski utilizes an establishing shot from behind the two characters in the car to show the long road ahead of them; it represents both women’s stunned and traumatized point of view.

The final moments before Wanda commits suicide are critical in creating a total sense of sympathy towards her. The diegetic Mozart symphony accompanies a peaceful suicide that lacks any sense of sentimentality and self-pity. If it was Pawlikowski’s intent to defame Jewish communists, then he would not have created a character with whom we, as the audience, can sympathize.  Wanda dies not in punishment for her actions as a Jewish, communist prosecutor, but in response to the losses she sustained during World War II. Nominally a Jewish communist, Wanda is universalized rather than caricatured,shown to be a resister, a punisher, a mourner, and a victim.

                                                            Edited by Ginny Isava and Nathan Mercado