So Far from Heaven

Summer can be wearing at times. The heat, the humidity, the days that linger bright into night and, to the chagrin of a movie lover, blockbuster season at the theatres. Because movies are both art and industry, there is no season like summer for the tumultuous special effects, pounding scores and repetitive plots of blockbusters to drown out the best of the seventh art. Fortunately and almost magically we come across a film like Ida at the three-dollar-Thursday show at our small local theatre. Ida’s quiet beauty is like a fresh breath of air in the muggy summer heat, it’s a film that reminds us why we love this art form.

Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska

Ida is shot in beautiful grey, black and white by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, with two women actors, a generation apart, both Agatas by name that are simply amazing in their art. This is a movie that is both a simple and straightforward narrative, while constituting one of the most painful and comprehensive examinations of Polish history of the previous century that one can find.

The film is set in 1962 and the recreation of the time period is so wonderful in its detail, in the frames and color used, that it feels like a film made that year. It is the story of Anna, a young woman raised in a Catholic orphanage and convent who decides to take her vows. Before she does, she is told she has a living relative, an aunt, whom she is sent to meet before becoming a nun. It is thus that she meets Wanda, a high ranking member of the communist party. The two women are apparent polar opposites in every way possible, but joined by a past that they journey towards together. Anna discovers not only that she is Jewish, but she also comes into contact with basically the worst and the best the world outside the convent holds.

The movie addresses many themes. Like life, there is no one issue facing these women. Tormented by her past, Wanda a former “believer”, in her case in the religion that can be a political ideology, has drugged herself into not feeling only to be awakened by the vision of her niece who, as a young woman, resembles her lost sister. Anna, sheltered by the life in the convent and held together by her religious beliefs, also awakens to life, a family, a history and the enigmatic presence of her aunt.

Pawlikowski was born in Poland and lived there until he was 14, so he has the memories of life in communist Poland, which is something clearly reflected in this film, although since he’s lived abroad and settled in Britain. He began as a documentary filmmaker and this is probably why his style has a lot of the observer in it, while containing so much emotionality. He has won awards for his documentary films From Moscow to Pietushki about Russian writer Venedikt Erofeev,  Dostoevsky's Travels about the only living descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the more successful  Serbian Epics, made at the height of the Bosnian War, among others. He has moved on to fiction and is the director of Last Resort, My Summer of Love and The Woman in the Fifth, starring Kristin Scott Thomas. Ida has already won many awards, including the Best Film Award at the London Film Festival and the International Critics Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It is certainly exciting to see a film that like poetry, says so much without speaking a lot. Like with Wes Anderson’s Film The Grand Budapest Hotel (commented on earlier in this blog, see The Amazing Wes Anderson), we find another filmmaker that creatively experiments with his frames, sets and shots; and, while with less flair than Anderson, has us glued to every image. Unlike Anderson, however, Pawlikowski fills us with the feeling of his characters, their horror, their grief, their unmitigated pain. So the artistic experience is complete. We walk out of the quietness that has filled the screen, somewhat changed by the coldness that has chilled our hearts back into the bright and hot daylight of a summer night.