Ida

In lifelike black and white Ida compares three characters’ choice of life in bleak 1962 Poland. 

The jazz musician lives his passionate art but is a gypsy, hitchhiking, roving from gig to gig. His offer of marriage, kids and a dog — in short, the conventional “life” — proves insufficient to win the heroine away from her path. 

Her aunt Wanda lives the most secular life but is riven with discontent and an unsalvable pain. We first meet her as a slatternly slob who has always refused to take her niece (Ida) out of the Catholic orphanage. She couldn’t and didn’t want to. 

That first sense of Wanda is corrected when we learn she is a state judge, admired for her wartime fight against the Nazis. But as our sense of her widens we learn that because she went into that her war she couldn’t protect her young son. He and Ida’s mother Roza were murdered by the Polish farmer who had initially hidden and fed them. As she now administers the Communists’ justice she can only feel her old ideals defeated. Her present trial is of a man who with his grandfather’s sword beheaded a row of tulips. Thus are the old glories fallen.

Wanda’s apartment is revealed in the same way she is. At first it seems small and sordid. Then it seems bigger, with classical music and some comfort. But after she jumps out the window we realize how big, well appointed and sunny it is. Like her career this aspect of her status is not enough to encourage her to keep living.

In contrast to the rootless saxophonist and the dissolute judge paralyzed by her loss, Ida proves the most rooted character — despite being uprooted from what she thought she was. Just before taking her vows to become a nun Ida learns she is Jewish. The farmer who killed her mother and cousin saved her by leaving her at the church. Though meeting her aunt only confirms her desire for religious security, Wanda’s suicide impels Ida to try the life she is about to decline. She dons Wanda’s dress, high heels, slivovitz, dancing and a lover. 

But just when we expect her to stay with these worldly pleasures she returns to the convent. Only after experiencing her aunt’s life is she ready to reject it. Having known temptation she can claim a virtue that is genuine, not the untested virtue Milton rejected as “cloistered.”  After learning her true roots she finds the most secure grounding in her adopted one.

In the last shot Ida walks up a darkening country road toward us. Several cars pass in the opposite direction, an emblem of the secular world she is moving away from. As she strides toward us she is firm, resolute, swelling almost to fill the screen. This contrasts in growth and substance to the first shot, where in wan service she helps touch up a statue of Christ before restoring it to its pit in the convent courtyard. Her faith has grown from cosmetic to profound.

The farmer digs up the remains of Ida’s mother and Wanda’s son, not to make amends for their murder but to secure his ownership of their old farm. He is a good man reduced to pragmatism. His gesture and his confession are at once horrible and grand. As Wanda described Roza, she always had stained glass beside the cowshit. This film is abut such intense paradoxes, the concatenation of the sordid and the glorious. Ida’s holiest action is the cross she makes when burying her mother’s remains in the Jewish cemetery. Her sentiment transcends the religious difference. 

Ida learns her family name is Lebenstein. Leben is living. This film asks: How shall we live?