What Ida gets right, and wrong

A Polish farmer standing shoulders-deep in a hole he has dug in wet, black dirt, searching for Jewish skeletons. As Poles uncover and handle Jewish bones, past sins, dirty conscience, betrayal, and buried grief return and have to be faced. In Paweł Łoziński's Miejsce urodzenia (Birthplace) (1992) the inhumanity of what the scene represents and the despair it bespeaks awake repulsion and grief. It was easier in Władysław Pasikowski's Pokłosie (Aftermath) (2013), where it is a Pole overwhelmed by compassion who digs up the bones of the Jews murdered by his neighbors. Finally, in Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida (2013), returns the murderous peasant of Birthplace – guilty, cruel, and sly, but somehow also crippled by what he did, and so more multi-dimensional – therefore, more human somehow, than the perhaps innocent grave-diggers of Birthplace.

Witnesses to German Nazi inhumanity and to Jewish, as well as their own, virtual helplessness in its face, yet freed in turn to rob, abuse and murder Polish Jewry, Poles were brutalised by the experience, and while indifference and fearful passivity may have remained the most common reactions to Jewish suffering, in many the anti-Jewish prejudice soured and turned to passionate hate: they joined in the German Judenjagd, becoming the hunters of Jews (see e.x. Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland). Poles may have killed Jews anywhere during those terrible war years, but in film the murders invariably occur in an area on the edge of human habitation, within the liminal zone where there lurks a werewolf in man. Be these portrayals true or false, they have now entered the language the cinema uses to talk about the Poles and the Jews during World War 2. The motif has become a myth: it means more than the Poles and the Jews, and must recur to help us make sense of historical events whose common sense explanations we cannot accept.

Set during the Stalinist regime, in the 1960s, Ida recounts a short period in the life of Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) – a young woman brought up in a convent who, on orders from her Mother Superior visits her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) and is told her real name is Ida Lebenstein. Pawlikowski's film shows Poland through associations of bleakness, emotional evisceration, and life lived on ruins of the past. While I do not know first-hand what the sixties in Poland were like, my parents' photographs from the times of their youth show a world nothing like the Poland of Ida. Pawlikowski's scenography is a construct arguing for the film's final conclusion: escaping this hopeless and desperate landscape is the only reasonable solution. On the outskirts of one of these gray places inhabited by boorish farmers Ida's parents were hidden and then murdered. It is there that Ida and Wanda meet the cadaver-digging Pole.

The protests of Polish Roman Catholic groups who demand that the film be amended with information on the realities of Poland under German occupation are misguided. Idais not about the exigencies of German rule in occupied Poland, and invoking the trees in Yad Vashem adds nothing to the viewers' comprehension. The film requires a context, but not the context of Polish righteousness; rather, a much broader Bloodlands context – and then more. Such knowledge seems to be too terrible for the Polish protesters to admit.

Anti-Polish Ida certainly is not; if anything, with its main Jewish characters a nun-to-be caring not a whit about her Jewishness and an inebriated, promiscuous once-upon-a-time aparatchik aunt who had sent (we assume – innocent) people to their deaths as a Stalinist prosecutor, one may wonder whether the film is not anti-Jewish. If the protesting Poles are so intent on telling the truth, why don't they demand that Ida be prefaced by an incisive analysis explaining the historical and social reasons for the overrepresentation of Jews in the structures of communist party in post-war Poland? While they're at it, I suggest an explanation of why the Jewish children saved by the undoubtedly heroic Catholic clergy in Poland rarely grew up to be Jews. There is a scene in Yurek Bogayevicz's Edges of the Lord that provides a counterpoint to Ida: when the Catholic priest who helps a Jewish boy posing as a Pole distributes the holy wafer to his congregation, he hands to the boy the cut-offs left over after the white rings of wafer had been taken out to be blessed: a considerate and selfless gesture, the sharing of the edges of the Lord. No such empathy in Ida.

The plot rests upon a juxtaposition of the two female characters, both Jewish: Ida and her aunt. Where Ida is a beautiful china doll who takes life in well-measured steps, her aunt, broken and disheveled middle-aged, is fire and a love of life whatever it may be -until she loved Ida, quite literally, to the death of her own. Ida, in contrast, focused on herself, is impervious to her aunt's pleadings and sarcasm, her lover's endearments, the sight of her parents' and her brother's faces, and learning of their tragic deaths. Not even when the murderer hands her their skulls – an event one imagines uprooting the foundations of one's world – does nothing to rearrange her concept of who she is. The double discovery – of an identity and a death- is never addressed. All that stoicism so that Ida -Anna, rather- can return to the convent with her self-image undisturbed.

The New Yorker  calls Ida a journey of identity; indeed, the film posits such a choice at its center: to be a nun or to go for a pair of uncomfortable heels, a string of pearls, vodka straight from the bottle, and a one-night-stand – the appearances Ida mistakes for the modes of secular morality. The film expresses Ida's emotions not by the actress's face or body language, but by stand-ins: the vocal and bodily gyrations of her fiery aunt, the Polish murderer Ida only speaks to once, asking: Why not me?, and the young man whom she meets, beds, questions Then what?, then discards. These emotional mirrors reflect also what Ida is not: she is not her Jewish aunt, she is the one child whose regular features and light hair were less likely to get a Pole killed and thus she survived, but neither is she at one with her Gentile friend. So the question of and then what? is easily answered: either way, there is nothing at all. Because, first and foremost, Ida is a study in rejection.

And another, more important choice, is never voiced, and another question never asked. The story of a Jew discovering his or her Jewish identity has at this point grown stale on me; I need to know, to paraphrase Ida, now what? Why doesn't Ida ask herself what her being Jewish may mean to her? She has a go at the secular life; why does she not at least try on her Jewishness, the way she tries on the pearls and the vodka? It may have been difficult if not impossible to be a Jew at that time in Poland in any other sense than that of an internalized, partially hidden identity, of memory, or of faith; but it was certainly possible in those ways. For Ida, though, Jewishness is inconsequential. Had she at least explored the appearances, she would have to ask herself what it is like -if it is not possible to learn what it actually is – to be a Jew; she would have to assess the viability of her Jewishness; try to make meaning out of her family's death; attempt to understand the significance of the virtual disappearance of Jewish communities from Poland; finally, she would have to critically appraise the Poles and their Church. She does none. The return to the convent is Ida's best, in fact her only choice.

There are scenes in Ida that are pure genius: Wanda's suicide, the murderer's confession. In just three words: So I – killed, delivered face-on, unadorned of excuses or explanations, he delivers a broken truth that is almost unbearable: there is a murderer in men. The grave-digging Pole, a calculating thief and bully, a murderer of the helpless and of the innocent, can admit his guilt, but not explain how it can be that he has done it and lived. It is a genuine, gripping and painful moment. Ida gathers up the bones of her family and withdraws into the frame. No unnecessary gestures, neither is there confusion in Ida: a veritable porcelain Madonna.

There are in this film also scenes whose banality and pretension makes one whimper with embarrassment. The scene where Ida and her aunt are burying human remains is utterly unconvincing. So are the scenes that cater to a nostalgia about the seemingly secure economic system of the 1960s. Finally, why does the camera repeatedly ponder objects like a bit of a rug and a slipper? It is not, as is the case in some films, that in that interval we are given space in which to think: in Ida, nothing points us to what we may need to think about. When another interminable shot presents the viewer with Ida's conventionally pretty face, one remembers Liv Ullman as she outstares the viewer in Bergman's Persona and the storm in her face is enough to last the viewer a lifetime of thoughts. Whether the director meant it as such or not, Ida's face is smooth white porcelain; there is emptiness there. There is little life. Is Ida dead? If so, did she die in the forest, together with her mother, father and brother? Did she die at the parish, left there by her family's murderer for the priest to do with what he would? Or did it happen later on, at the convent? Deadness of feeling is excellent protection against pain; unfortunately, it also prevents one from growing. 

Ida shirks the responsibility that there is in the terrible knowledge imparted to its main character. In today's Poland, whose practising Jewry could probably fit inside one American synagogue, the question of whether Ida is or is not Jewish is a fundamental question. Still another issue is who are the Jews in Ida? In Birthplace, the Jew is a visitor return to tell the truth, calling out  j'accuse!; in Aftermath Jews are dry bones and an Israeli flag incongruous in a field of rye; Polish Jews in the 1960s were mostly unmoored and adrift, with few Jewish spiritual options but in Ida, the Jew can only be three things: a corpse, a Christian, or a suicide. That is why, with all her choices, Ida is not an identity movie. Ida's identity is fixed before the plot takes off, and remains such through other characters' despair, incomprehension, confusion, and love. Hers is a meaningful story wrecked by retelling.

Joanna Auron-Górska, PhD, just finished “Describing Who?”- an examination of the images of Jews and Poles in Western photography, published with Peter Lang, http://www.peterlang.com/download/datasheet/80210/datasheet_264702.pdf