Portside

Amazing Ida. Just an hour and twenty minutes of footage in black and white to confirm the conviction that films have much to say, as long as they shake off the stereotypes imposed by the big industry.

The Polish film swept the European awards and finally won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year. Its director, Pawel Pawlikovski, resorted to an aesthetic of the 60s (Wajda, Bergman, Bresson, Godard) not because of mere retro desire, but because the events the film depicts and the powerful resulting emotional impact  occurred at the beginning of that decade.

Ida narrates the adventures of two women in search of a truth; but at the same time the film is a display of questions about Poland’s past.

The film includes in its exploratory perspective topics as burning as the repression of Jews and their subsequent incorporation into society after the end of World War II; collaboration; and the immediate implementation of a social system conditioned by Stalinism. Ida has raised controversy in Poland from sectors which accuse it of being too partial and lacking historical concreteness, for example, the fact that it does not emphasize one of its conflicts (the murder of a Jewish peasant family by a Pole who covets their land) occurs during Hitler's German occupation.

The director has claimed in his defense that he did not want to make a political film; and the truth is, if he had filmed with historical underlining and clarification of various kinds, Ida would not have been the tour de force it is, with its aesthetic of loneliness, masterfully portrayed in a black and white framed in the same dimensions (almost square) we used to see in the sixties.

Two women in search of truth: a girl of 18 who is about to become a nun, and her aunt, whom she must visit before taking her vows. The girl was raised in a convent and her aunt, an old apparatchik without the luster that made her transcend in the past, takes refuge in alcohol and sex, but without losing the certain gallantry of a woman who has taken advantage of the pleasures of life.

Then the film presents spirituality and faith against vulgar materialism. The novice will learn from her aunt that she is Jewish; for a few hours, she will discover the world beyond the walls of the convent, and will embark on a journey to her roots trying to discover what happened to her parents.

Not too much dialogue; close-ups made for great actresses like Agata Trzebuchowska and Agata Kulesza; and minimum elements in order to create a work that, controversy notwithstanding, is superb.

[Rolando Pérez Betancourt was a founder of the newspaper GRANMA in 1965.  He is a renowned journalist, novelist and one of the sharpest critics of cinema in Cuba. This article is a CubaNews translation, edited by Walter Lippmann.]