Ida (2013)
Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski
In 1960s Poland, young novitiate Anna is on the verge of taking her vows when she discovers a family secret dating back to the years of the German occupation.
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22 films that influenced Ida
What critics say influenced Ida
These love scenes occur in a provincial hotel like the one in Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds.
There are echoes of Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and Janusz Morgenstern’s Goodbye, Until Tomorrow (1961), both of which starred Cybulski, as well as Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), and although none of these luminously monochromatic movies used the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio that Pawlikowski employs; neither would they have discussed the fate suffered by Jews during the German occupation so vividly or evoked the shabbiness of the Communist regime as straightforwardly.
Set in the Poland of 1962 and composed of austerely gorgeous black and white images, Pawel Pawlikowski ’s "Ida" could fit right into the "Masterpieces" series, evoking as it does films ranging from Andrzej Wajda ’s "Innocent Sorcerers" to Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s "Mother Joan of the Angels" (both 1960).
There are echoes of Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and Janusz Morgenstern’s Goodbye, Until Tomorrow (1961), both of which starred Cybulski, as well as Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), and although none of these luminously monochromatic movies used the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio that Pawlikowski employs; neither would they have discussed the fate suffered by Jews during the German occupation so vividly or evoked the shabbiness of the Communist regime as straightforwardly.
It’s a film of moments, observations and moods, with a lyrical unfolding that recalls such atmospheric monochrome road movies as Wim Wenders ’ "Kings of the Road."
Nobody who knows Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” can forget the sequences filmed in Poland, some of them near former extermination camps.
“If you could lick my heart it would poison you,” an aged Polish Jewish partisan tells Claude Lanzmann near the end of Shoah .
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Set in the Poland of 1962 and composed of austerely gorgeous black and white images, Pawel Pawlikowski ’s "Ida" could fit right into the "Masterpieces" series, evoking as it does films ranging from Andrzej Wajda ’s "Innocent Sorcerers" to Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s "Mother Joan of the Angels" (both 1960).
In the context of a story about a virginal, silent novice, this is practically the equivalent of Natalie Wood’s Louise in Gypsy first stepping out to sing “Let Me Entertain You.”
The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography resonates to Polish master Andrzej Wajda’s treatment of similar subjects—the post-Holocaust Landscape After Battle (1970) and Man of Marble’s (1977) rebuke of Communist heroes—but with even more poetic lyricism besides the poignant social realism.
The relationship between the two is worthy of the Bresson of Diary of a Country Priest, and far more intense than the simple plot outline of what is only an eighty-minute film.
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I almost expected to see the donkey from Au Hasard Balthazar wandering about in the background.
But there’s also a pervasive, underlying layer of personal hardship and struggle: It doesn’t feel like a stretch to place Ida alongside, say, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and Elem Klimov’s Come and See, films haunted by the loss of a spouse and a subsequent darkening in the filmmaker’s view of the worldview.