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Film: Ida

  • Gemma Simmonds CJ

Films about nuns tend to be laden with ideological and cinematic clichés. The sisters are either impossibly beautiful, haunted souls hovering on the edge of ecstasy; idiotic but jolly cheerleader types, liable to break out into spirit-lifting song at the twang of a guitar string; or monstrous harpies persecuting innocent children with sadistic zealotry, Gemma Simmonds CJ writes in Thinking Faith, Either way, lunatic religion and the repression of overwhelming sexual impulses are never far from the surface. The inner life that has these sisters gazing permanently into the unseen distance, gurning at the problem-laden in need of a lift or scourging infants with their rosary beads never reveals itself with any particular clarity.

Shot in monochrome with such aching restraint that it makes most current cinematography feel like a visit to a fast food outlet, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is a remarkable exception to this rule and works brilliantly, both as an artistic treasure and as a thoughtful and provocative tale set within the context of religious life. Set in Poland in the early 1960s, it tells the tale of Anna, a novice in the convent which rescued her as an orphaned baby. The bleakness and sterility of her surroundings are evoked powerfully within the convent interior but also by parallel shots of the wintry weather outside. The sense, though, which gathers momentum as the film progresses, is that it has been stifling winter in Poland, within and without, for long, dreary years. Anna is content enough in her life, or at least sufficiently resigned to it to be shocked and fearful when the briskly wise superior of the community reveals that Anna has an aunt who has asked to see her and insists that she does so before taking her vows. The closed world of rural Catholic Poland, which has been Anna’s entire universe, is broken open suddenly and brutally as she sets out on her reluctant voyage of discovery.

Click here to read on: www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/ida

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