Benefits of the Doubt: Pawlikowski’s Ida and the taste(s) of ambiguity

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Copyright 2015 Jeremi Szaniawski

Benefits of the Doubt: Pawlikowski’s Ida and the taste(s) of ambiguity

Jeremi Szaniawski, Massey University

Summary

Set in Poland in 1962, Ida tells the story of a young novice – Anna (played by newcomer

Agata Trzebuchowska), who, just a few days before taking her vows, is instructed by the

Mother Superior of her convent to visit her sole remaining family member—her aunt

Wanda Gruz, a judge living in Warsaw (Agata Kulesza). During her short visit to this

woman she has never met, Anna finds out that she is actually Jewish, hidden during the

war while still an infant by a Catholic priest, and that her real name is Ida—the daughter

of Róża and Haim Lebenstein, who both disappeared during the war. Silently stunned by

the news, the young woman decides to return to the convent, but Wanda finds her at the

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bus station, and together they go back on the tracks of a painful past, in search of Ida’s

lost identity and Wanda’s unspoken quest for reconciliation with her traumatic past. In

the course of their trip to Ida’s hometown, Wanda reveals to Ida that she used to be a

powerful figure under Stalin, nicknamed ‘Red Wanda’, and having ‘even sentenced a few

people to death’. Shortly thereafter the two women pick up a hitchhiker, a young

saxophonist (Dawid Ogrodnik), whom Ida is intrigued by and possibly attracted to,

something that does not escape Wanda’s inquisitive gaze. She encourages her niece to

drop her religious garb and have an affair with the young musician, if only to give

meaning to the ‘sacrifice’ that her vows of chastity entail.

Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013, all rights reserved)

Following a confrontation with the peasants who moved into the Lebenstein’s farm after

the war, Wanda and Ida are finally taken to the place in the woods where their family was

murdered and buried--by the very same Polish peasant family who hid them during the

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war, letting Ida live on account of her ‘non-Jewish’ looks. The two women then drive to

Lublin with the remains of Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son (left in the custody of the

Lebensteins while Wanda was fighting the Nazis), and bury their dead in an abandoned

Jewish cemetery near Lublin.

Shortly thereafter, Anna returns to the convent and takes her vows, while Wanda, who

has been leading an increasingly dissolute lifestyle of drinking and casual sex, finally

commits suicide by jumping out the window of her apartment, in a clearly thought-out,

deliberate gesture.

Now living in her aunt’s lavish apartment, it is Ida’s turn, having seemingly left the

convent, to try to follow her aunt’s teachings, eventually spending a night with the

saxophonist. However, the young woman, who seems more aroused by the sight of a

fellow novice bathing than by the embraces of her male lover, abruptly abandons all her

newly adopted lifestyle and material belongings—and all the promises of ‘normal’ life in

matrimony contained therein.

In the final scene, Ida is seen donning her nun’s clothing once again, walking at dusk on a

countryside road, toward an uncertain fate.

Critique

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) marks an important moment in the opening of post-

communist Polish cinema onto the global scene. Although some Polish films of the last

two decades have received a modicum of international attention (Wajda’s Katyn, for

instance, was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film in 2008), their succès d’estime

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is in no way comparable to the prestige enjoyed by, say, post-communist Romanian or

Russian cinema at film festivals and with audiences worldwide. The contrast is

particularly palpable since Poland was a leading nation in European film from the late

1950s and well into the 1970s, before devolving into a rather insular audiovisual

landscape, by and large unknown to those outside its borders. Ida, however, begs to

differ, and after a successful festival run, which saw it taking prizes at the London,

Toronto and Gdynia festivals, it received nominations as best foreign picture at both the

2015 Golden Globes and Academy Awards, and earned the Oscar—quite a feat for a

small, slow and intimate film, but with a multi-layered and momentous message.1

Characterized by beautiful and carefully composed and lush black and white

cinematography (often reminiscent of the works of photographer James Nachtwey), Ida

uses its restrained form to offer a gripping allegory of a country still very much in search

of its identity, while tackling a score of taboo issues in Polish culture: anti-Semitism,

alcoholism, homosexuality, and, last but not least, the question of ‘Non-Jewish Jews’—

people of Jewish descent who, for a variety of reasons, had to hide their true origins,

sometimes to the point of forgetting about them altogether, at least for a while, and

sometimes shunning the implications of such rediscovered heritage. With such a baggage

of sensitive, potentially fraught subject matters, it is not surprising that Ida should raise

fierce objections among its detractors. While the ‘Polish League Against Defamation’

(Reduta Dobrego Imienia - Polska Liga Przeciw Zniesławieniom) recently sent a petition2

to the National Film Institute’s Agnieszka Odorowicz, arguing that the film had a hidden

anti-Polish agenda, blaming the Poles for the Holocaust, Helena Datner, of Warsaw’s

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Jewish Institute of History, criticized the film’s depiction of Gruz, as an ‘alcoholic and a

whore’,3 in a film purportedly catering to the vile anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jewish

woman as promiscuous and amoral, complicit with the Stalinist regime.


While Datner definitely had a point in her negative reaction against a film, which

otherwise received nothing but overwhelming praise in the Polish media,4 deeming it

schematic and superficial, her criticism bespoke a steadfast emotional (and

understandable) resistance to any form of anti-Semitic clichés, rather than a pointed and

level-headed assessment of the film. Still, her criticism is not without grounds, especially

if one were to look at Ida solely as a realist character study, psychologically driven and

historically accurate (like, say, the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan). But even though the

film’s skillful reconstruction of 1962 Poland could lead one on the path of such a realist

reading, it is a sparse and minimalist account of that period, and the characters depicted

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therein are more akin to types or poetic silhouettes etched against the milky textures of

the screen, rather than full-fledged individualities evolving in a realistic socio-economic

environment. As such, looking at the film as a metaphoric rite-of-initiation remains the

favored (but not only) course of analysis. At any rate, in either approach—the

metaphorical or the psychological one—Ida’s Wanda Gruz is anything but a heartless

character, let alone a whore, whichever way one elects to read her: she is either an re-

gendered allegory of the melancholy father figure without a purpose (something

suggested in her function as a depressed Judge under a totalitarian regime, as well as her

authoritativeness, but also positively hinted at in her role as Ida’s adjuvant or guide), or

simply a beautiful yet scarred human being, proud and dignified in spite of having lost

everything—including her sister and her child—to the Holocaust, and who, owing her

survival to a clear ethos of resilience, went up the ladder of Stalinist Poland and became a

judge there, her actions atoned for, if not justified, by the magnitude of her trauma. Yet,

returning to Datner’s accusation, it is indeed in how Gruz’s character is legible on

multiple levels that we may find one of the sources of the film’s ambiguity, raising some

important questions, and also possibly doubts as to its political message and actual goal.

Indeed, Gruz is at once very clearly inspired by, and very different from Helena

Wolińska-Brus (1919–2008), infamous in Poland for her role in early 1950s Stalinist

show-trials, and who never expressed any qualms publicly for that highly problematic

part of her biography. Ida’s director Pawel Pawlikowski, who knew Wolińska

personally—although he was unaware of her Stalinist past for many years—described her

as a jovial, witty and brazenly outspoken elderly lady.5 Conversely, Wanda Gruz is

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deeply introverted, sensitive, and only carries the mask of indifference to protect herself.

If she comes across as cold toward Anna/Ida at the very beginning of the film, she very

quickly turns out to be a highly caring, nurturing presence, mellowing in the company of

her ‘Jewish nun’ of a niece. Her role in revealing her real past to Ida and helping her

break free from the narrow path promised by life in the cloister, opening up her

perspective onto the world, and finally offering a proper burial ground to their family, is

arguably the most important and meaningful narrative engine of the film.


In an interview for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Pawlikowski has established

a clear correlation between himself and Ida’s character, speaking of his own little-known

Jewish roots (his father was of Jewish descent, yet as with many Poles in post-war

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Poland, this was kept a secret, and Pawlikowski grew up Catholic). More importantly

still, the director has made it plain that his wish was, through this film, to rehabilitate all

‘negative’ parties involved: to humanize the ‘Red Judge’, Wanda Gruz, accounting for

her idealistic youth that led her to join the communist ranks (instead of the Home Army,

the ‘Armia Krajowa’ (A.K.), associated with the Polish Catholic movement), but also to

somewhat justify the actions of the peasants who first hid, and then killed the

Lebensteins, and ended up taking over their farm. Both have to pay the price: the peasant,

digging up the grave where he placed the bodies of the people he murdered in order to

save his own family from the Nazis, experiences deep remorse, possibly under the threats

of Wanda. The latter’s suicide can also come across as a form of self-inflicted

punishment for her actions during the show-trials, and thus as a symbolic reparation for

Wolińska’s refusal to show remorse, let alone apologize to the families of Polish officers

and underground members she sentenced to death. Pawlikowski’s film would thus show

and try to explain the complexities of human characters and the intricacies that led them

to perpetrate certain crimes under the most extreme circumstances, and in so doing it

would seek to reunite all of Poland in one sweeping gesture of atonement and

forgiveness. Coming to terms with the traumatic past of both the Holocaust and Stalinism

all at once, and participating in an effort of reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles—a

perennially fraught issue in Polish culture, but also one that is far from being as simple as

is commonly perceived outside of Poland—such is indeed the avowed, and quixotically

ambitious goal of Pawlikowski. This is a tall order, to say the least, one which is bound to

leave any alerted viewer feeling somewhat uncomfortable, poised between disbelief and

slight embarrassment, for all its loftiness. Can such idealism truly exist in the realm of

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commercial filmmaking, and, furthermore, in a system where government funding is

indispensable to a project’s viability?

Something is left unspoken in the director’s grand conciliatory scheme, namely that, in

humanizing Gruz, indeed making her the most developed and deeply relatable character

of the film, Pawlikowski has gone against the grain of those films similarly reconsidering

the War and Stalinism and made during the Kaczyński Twins’ (and their political party,

‘Law and Justice’ (PiS)) reign. During that period, Andrzej Wajda was given free rein to

unambiguously blame the Soviets for the massacre of the Polish officers in Katyn,6 while

journeyman Ryszard Bugajski directed General Nil (2010), a film which shows the

horror of the persecution of Polish officers in Stalinist jails. In this latter film it is

Wolińska, one of the prime targets of the Kaczyńskis’ witch-hunt against members of the

communist elite, who is represented not as a jovial and witty woman, but as a cold-

hearted, primitive and insensitive bureaucrat, and Polish president Bolesław Bierut

(1892-1956) as a sociopathic caricature, a puppet of Stalin.7 Against the agenda seeking

to settle old scores with the past, Pawlikowski definitely opts to embrace the

disingenuous rhetoric of ‘love’ promoted by Donald Tusk during the victorious election

of the Citizens’ Platform (PO) in 2008, which would lead to the uneasy cohabitation with

president Lech Kaczyński, until his death in the Smolensk air crash in April 2010, and the

PO’s stronghold over the country since then. Clearly, only the naïve mind will fail to

realize the subliminal rhetoric at work with Ida, which ends up being a film that does not

quite include everyone indeed, but rather proposes a more appeased, more sophisticated

re-investment of Polish 20th century historic tropes in Poland’s latest political landscape:

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open to everyone, except to the vindictive PiS, and therefore its conservative Catholic

constituents—a non-negligible segment of the Polish population. As such, it may hardly

be committing a major crime, but in failing to escapes realpolitik, the film may leave a bit

of an ashen taste in one’s mouth, in view of Pawlikowski’s professed goals, and the

otherwise momentous topics it could have handled with even more nobleness otherwise.8

Along similar lines, we may point out the aforementioned (and no doubt Catholic) ‘Polish

League against Defamation’, whose petition to Agnieszka Odorowicz clearly suggests,

between the lines, that Ida, in its lack of historical contextualization, particularly vital, in

the eyes of the petition’s author, Maciej Świrski, for foreign viewers, ultimately seems to

indict the Poles, and not the Nazis, for the Holocaust. This reaction is part of a broader

movement currently going on amidst the Polish conservatives, consisting in refusing the

blame for the suffering of the Jewish victims of the war and the survivors of the

concentration camps, to defend Poland’s reputation and ultimately to avoid having to

procure financial reparation from Poland for the Holocaust.9 So that controversy and

ideological unease follows this gorgeously crafted, wonderfully paced but indeed

ambiguous film. Yet if this message is coded, it is not cryptic beyond legibility. The rich

ambiguity of the film thus lies elsewhere as well—not in the conspiratorial, creeping and

undeclared project that some want to ascribe to it, but rather in its tone and political

unconscious.

Critics of the film have all saluted its black and white cinematography and austere

aesthetics, relating them to the films of Wajda of the 1960s (surely the nightclub scene

inescapably evokes Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni Czarodzieje, 1960), but in a

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contemporary, Haneke-Tarr’esque morbidity), and Truffaut. Here too the critics seem to

have been oblivious to what seems evident to any cinephile: the film’s framing, its choice

of aspect ratio, high contrast yet soft cinematography, and utmost rigor of mise-en-scene,

characterized by rigorously still compositions, are indebted neither to Wajda or Truffaut,

both keen on highly kinetic filmmaking,10 but rather to the high achievements of Ingmar

Bergman made precisely in the period depicted in the film, namely the early 1960s. Ida’s

tropes (two women on a journey, the barren wintry landscapes, the trauma of war, the

sexual anomie, the alcoholism, the quandaries of religious faith in the modern world)

seem all straight out of Bergman’s Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963), The Silence

(Tystnaden, 1963), Shame (Skammen, 1968) and, perhaps, Wild Strawberries

(Smultronstället, 1958) for the more heartwarming moments between Wanda and Ida

(much as Isak Borg and his daughter-in-law in Bergman’s film).

Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957, all rights reserved)

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The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963, all rights reserved)

Here, Pawlikowski channels the Swedish master of modern European cinema, no doubt

because of his usefulness to tackle one of the film’s most important themes, namely

identity. For the author of Persona, identity—political, spiritual, sexual and otherwise—

was always a point of contention which led to the characters’ conflicts and doubts,

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reflecting the director’s own tortured relationship to faith and closeted homosexuality.

His was consequently a cinema of depression, incommunicability,11 which is only

redeemed by the act of filmmaking, or by the praxis of neurotic existence in the modern

world, the world without God. It is intriguing, in this sense, that Pawlikowski would use

such a clear point of reference when trying to tell a story not only about the dialectics of

faith and doubt, about skepticism in view of humanity’s many lapses, and immanent

human goodness and ability for redemption, but also precisely about the questioning of

one’s identity and the need to revive religion and faith, not as ossified institutions, but as

living practices capable of elevating the human soul. This Catholic take on a Lutheran

master creates a strange, if seductive mix, one which instantiates the (fake) ambiguity of

the film’s political message, legible to all with a modicum of political awareness indeed,

as has been shown above, into a true formal and philosophical conundrum. And so the

film’s closing scene—the only handheld shot of the entire film—a backward tracking

shot which precedes Ida, in her religious garment, as she walks a small countryside road

at night, goes far beyond the ‘open-endedness’ it overtly implies, to the sound of the first

piece of extra-diegetic music in the film (a piano transcription of Bach’s Ich Ruf Zu Dir

Herr Jesu Christ). It may either constitute an act of great humility or an arrogant and

possibly glib assertion over the indeterminate nature of religion and the becoming of

Polish culture. But more interestingly, Pawlikowski might be telling us that the questions

that were raised by Ida—the non-Jewish Jew—in 1962 have not yet been elucidated, and

that Poland has yet, indeed, to come to terms with its deeper neuroses.

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Anna’s/Ida’s fate is thus akin to Poland’s: in spite of surviving the traumas (the orphan

miraculously rescued and then kept in the cold but reassuring boundaries of the convent

and the structures of religion), the resilient young woman, torn between two identities—

one manifest, the other one freshly unearthed—must come to terms with her true past,

and, perhaps even more importantly, with the true nature of her desire, although the latter

will not be resolved or answered clearly, but merely alluded to in the course of the film.

To suggest, as Ida does, that (at least a portion of) Catholic Poland is actually a Jewish

woman, of uncertain sexual orientation, to boot, is the kind of statement, however

thought-provoking and perhaps partly accurate, that would once again have the

conservatives seething with rage—a climate hardly conducive to reconciliations across

the board. Yet a film of this scope and technical excellence has, among its many other

merits, that of opening the door to an adult and serious discussion of issues that are

usually swept under the rug or schematized and jettisoned at each other by the various

opposing groups in the current cultural and political landscape of Poland. In this, Ida’s

multifarious ambiguities taste no longer of ashes, but rather acquire the bouquet of an

invigoratingly bittersweet and subtly earthy vintage.

1 For a moment during the Oscars nomination campaign, the film’s distributors even submitted the

film in the main categories, as it had been screened theatrically in the US, hoping the emulate the

success at the Awards of other recent European productions such as The Artist (2011) or Amour

(2012).

2 The text of the petition (in Polish) can be found here: http://citizengo.org/en/signit/15781/view

When last accessed, the petition had been signed by over 50,000 people, but still significantly short of

its 100,000 goal.

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3 ‘Co Polacy chcieliby myśleć o Żydówce, budującej powojenny socjalizm? Że to k*rwa i alkoholiczka’

(‘What would Poles like to think of a Jewish woman, building post-‐war socialism? That she is a sl*t

and an alcoholic’), quoted in Rojek, http://natemat.pl/80843,ida-‐pelna-‐antysemickich-‐stereotypow,

accessed October 3, 2014).

4 The film was acclaimed all across the spectrum of political allegiance, from Rzeczpospolita to

Gazeta Wyborcza—such unanimity being in itself a problematic symptom in any democratic society.

5 ‘Fajna, dowcipna pani z niewyparzoną gębą’, Pawlikowski, interviewed by Tadeusz Sobolewski in

Gazeta Wyborcza, 17.09.2013

http://wyborcza.pl/1,75475,14621271,Rezyser__Idy___Polska_moze_byc_cool__ROZMOWA_.html#ixz

z3Ht89dIQa

6 Until the fall of communism, the official version in Poland regarding the Katyn massacre was that it

had been carried out by the Nazis.

7 Here it is not useless to point out that Bierut died of a heart attack in Moscow, right at the time

when Nikita Khrushchev was conducting the process of de-‐Stalinization.

8 In the interview referenced above, Pawlikowski explains how to him the Polish character is

determined by nobleness (‘szlachetność’, the human trait) as opposed to nobility (‘szlachta’, the social

class of the pre-‐communist land-‐owners).

9 The concern of the conservatives is twofold: on the one hand, there is a staunch refusal of Poland to

conceive of itself as anything else than a victim of World War II, rightly denouncing unfortunate

expressions such as ‘the Polish concentration camps’, but just as unfortunately glossing over the

pogroms which took place in Eastern Poland, or the displacement of German speaking populations in

the West after the war; on the other hand, Poland, although a relatively robust economy, does not

quite benefit from the auspicious prospects that West Germany had when it agreed to the Third

Reich Reparation act and enjoyed through the second half of the twentieth century.

10 As a matter of fact, if one were to truly correlate Ida to a Polish filmmaker, it would be Roman

Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962), quoted somewhat cryptically in the scene with the hitchhiker.

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11 Save for Bergman’s celebrated close-‐ups of faces, which are the locus of unspoken communication

in his films. It is also useful to note how the specific framing which consists in dwarfing characters at

the bottom of the frame, as in the space of a church, leaving much empty and cold space above the

characters, is reiterated in Ida’s beautiful yet almost overly signifying scenes in the convent.

Benefits of the Doubt: Pawlikowski’s Ida and the taste(s) of ambiguity

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