Butler's Cinema Scene

Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska in “Ida”

“IDA”  My rating: A (Opening June 6 at the Tivoli)

80 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The simple description of “Ida” is that it’s about two women on a road trip.

Yeah, and “Citizen Kane” is about sledding.

Pawel Pawlikowski‘s film – the first feature he has made in his native Poland, having at age 14 fled the country’s Communist regime for a life in the West — is a low-keyed masterpiece.

“Ida”  succeeds brilliantly as the personal story of two very different but inescapably linked women. But it also provides an examination/indictment of Poland’s troubled past, from the endemic anti-Semetism that found many Poles happily helping out with Hitler’s “final solution” to the drab amorality of the post-war Communist years.

And while it’s doing all that, “Ida” does something even more astounding. It achieves a sort of meditative state, thanks to languid pacing, some of the most beautiful black-and-white cinematography you’ve ever seen, and a performance by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska that is so saint-like it seems to have been plucked from the canons of Dryer and Bresson.

In 1961 young Anna (Trzebuchowska) is about to take her vows as a Roman Catholic nun when she’s called into the Mother Superior’s office and told that before joining the order she must spend time with her only living relative – an aunt that Anna didn’t know existed.

Wanda (Agata Kulesza) is a fortysomething atheist and alcoholic.  When Anna shows up at her doorstep, Wanda is sucking on a cigarette and waiting for her one-night stand to clear out of her bedroom. This cynic seems to take pleasure in informing Anna that her name is actually Ida Lebenstein.  What’s more, Anna/Ida – an orphan whose entire life has been spent in the convent — is a Jew.

“A Jewish nun,” Wanda snorts.

Agata Trzebuchowska

She goes on to explain that during the war she joined the resistance, leaving her beloved sister  – Ida’s mother – and other members of the Lebenstein clan to be hidden from the Germans by local farmers. Wanda and baby Ida were the only ones to survive the war. The deaths of the others are shrouded in mystery.

Now Wanda – a magistrate who made her bones overseeing big Communist show trials – loads her niece into her Soviet-made sedan and heads out to the country. They’ll visit the farm where Wanda grew up and where Ida was born, pose a few unsettling questions to the locals, and perhaps come up with some answers.

You’d be hard pressed to find more unlikely travelling companions.  Anna/Ida is quiet and still, gazing at the world with big unblinking eyes that seem filled with spiritual wisdom. Yet she has never experienced life as the rest of us know it. It’s difficult to say if she is appalled or fascinated by the new world unfolding before her.

Wanda, on the other hand, has experienced too much life. As a high party official she feels justified in driving drunk, insulting cops and small-town bigwigs, and threatening the furtive farmers who have been harboring dark secrets ever since the war. She practically rubs Anna’s face in her promiscuity. And while Anna clings to her daily rituals of prayer, Wanda seems bereft of faith.  Not in God, certainly, but not in Communism, either.

There’s a third major player in this tale, a hitchhiking young musician (Dawid Ogrodnik) they convey to a sterile provincial hotel (a perfect example of depressing socialist architecture) where he contributes his alto saxophone to catchy if bland dance tunes.  After hours he gets down with some serious jazz.  Ida has been unruffled and, apparently, unmoved by her aunt’s blatant sexuality, but hearing this handsome fellow blow a John Coltrane ballad, she is moved in a profound — if ungodly — manner.

Saint though Anna/Ida may be, I believe I prefer her aunt, who looks like Claire Bloom after a rough night and radiates sexuality tinged with a bitterness over her betrayal by both her Polish countrymen and the political system she helped build. Kulesza gives one of the great performances of this or any other year — funny, sardonic, heartbreaking.

Technically, “Ida”  offers some of the finest black-and-white images ever captured. I have no idea how  Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal pulled it off, but their cinematography is so tactile you can practically feel the weave of fabric in the characters’ heavy overcoats. This isn’t show-offy cinematography,  yet it possesses a richness and depth that is overwhelmingly sensual.

And Pawlikowski chose to shoot his film in an old-fashioned, nearly square frame ratio that harkens back to the era in which the story is set.

“Ida” has the feel of greatness. Great characters. Great stories. Great themes. Once seen, it doesn’t easily let go.

| Robert W. Butler