It’s impossible to discuss the film “Ida” without spoilers, because, without spoilers, there’s no way to show how the movie is a pernicious fraud—an aesthetic one and a historical one. I have no idea whether the movie is based on a true story. There’s no title card or other information in the film that suggests as much. It tells the story of Anna, a novitiate in a Polish convent in the early nineteen-sixties who is told, by her only surviving relative, her aunt Wanda, that she was born to a Jewish family, and was named Ida. What matters is not the ring of truth but the ring of specificity. The movie is dematerialized; it never conveys the sense that “this happened” or “this is happening,” but, rather, that “this sort of thing happened.” Nothing in the film is a solid thing or an action; everything is an example.
For instance, when a man who is confessing to a horrific crime digs in a forest to exhume his victims’ bones, he never seems to dig the hole; his digging is generic, and the same is true when Anna (or, rather, Ida) and Wanda dig a grave to rebury those bones. The images and sounds don’t show that they dug, they show how they might dig. Anna, packing to visit her aunt, is seen together with two other novitiates; they’re close to the camera, but what they say to each other remains unknown. Wanda picks up a man in a bar, but their talk is absent—she just smiles and chats, and their voices go unrecorded. Anna learns from Wanda that she is Jewish, that her real name is Ida. What does she think about Jews, what has she learned about Jews in the convent? The movie offers no trace. It filters out all supposedly extraneous context to stick not merely to the story but to Pawlikowski’s historical point.
Wanda is no mere private citizen dispensing secrets about the past. She is a political functionary—a low-level judge who now discharges her judicial duties distractedly and cynically. (While conducting a petty, politically motivated trial and listening to a canting, ideological prosecutor, she looks bored and casts her glance aside.) And Wanda has a confession of her own, which she makes to Ida: she was a former prosecutor and hard-line Communist who seems to have lost her political faith. Formerly known as “Red Wanda,” Wanda sent so-called “enemies of the people” to their death.
The subject of the film and Pawlikowski’s aesthetic converge in peculiar ways. Pawlikowski’s shots strain after a sense of originality with off-center framings and herald their own gravity with their stillness. The director advertises the seriousness of his approach by filming in black-and-white. But the aesthetic also embodies a historical idea: not only is “Ida” a film that could have been made in 1962, but, more important, it’s one that should have been made in 1962 but couldn’t because of the strictures of the socialist regime. If a story like that of “Ida” wasn’t made into a movie at the time when its events could have happened, it’s precisely because the censorious regime was sustained by Wanda and other functionaries of her sort.
Yet the movie doesn’t tell a story of individuals but, rather, of ciphers, whom Pawlikowski moves upon a chessboard of history. He is making a declaration: there were Jewish victims of the war in Poland—Jews who were killed by Nazis and, yes, even by Poles—but that Jews weren’t solely victims. Jews, too, were killers, including those who got their revenge on Poland by propelling themselves to power with the rise of Communism. (Wanda’s sarcastic reference to Poland’s “good Christians” and her threat to “destroy” a Pole who impedes her investigation into her family’s past indicates the wrath that her power slakes.)
The evenhandedly editorializing accusations that Pawlikowski builds stealthily into the movie are repellent. Even as he nourishes the notion of collective or national guilt—and seeks to expiate it—with the movie’s ceremonial tone, Pawlikowski also insinuates that the victims were no angels, either, and that maybe some of them have something to atone for as well. “Ida” is, in effect, “12 Years a Slave” in which Solomon Northup shows up in the South, after the Civil War, as a carpetbagger. Ultimately, the movie legitimizes resentment of the very Jews who were murdered on Polish soil—even at the hands of Poles.
After Wanda learns the fate of her son—he was killed because she abandoned him during the war in order to fight with the Resistance, a cause that she now shrugs off as dubious—and reburies him, she kills herself. Why does she kill herself? Did she go on living only in order to learn of her son’s fate, only to give him a proper burial, before going to her own grave? The sentimental lure comes off mainly as a screenplay trick with a double purpose. First, Wanda, the Communist with blood on her hands, is at least distinguished by this penance for her crimes. Second, it subtracts Wanda from the future—rather, from the present tense of the making and the viewing of the movie, in 2014—and suppresses any angry speculation about where in Poland, today, a woman nearing ninety, a former death-dealer of the Communist regime, may be living in her own unmerited tranquility.
Did such things as those depicted in “Ida” happen? Maybe. But “Ida” is a movie made solely out of its such-ness. Despite the intense emotionalism that Pawlikowski milks, the movie is a history lesson in editorial form, a thumbnail sketch of a textbook illustration of Poland’s litany of horrors, affixed to characters but set forth without the benefit of any first-person experience. Sister Anna would be about seventy today; what she says and does could be the basis for a great movie.
