Wayward paths to devotion

JB's a bad blogger! It's true, I have been neglectful of late with the posts. Genuine busyness and occasional cynicism are my only excuses. I will heretofore attempt to make amends, dear readers. (That was plural, which implies my cheerful assumption that you are more than one in number.) Now that we are in the hazy hot days of summer, let us turn our attention to winter... monochromatic winter! And Poland. And nuns...

Ida follows a young orphan raised in a convent who, on the verge of taking her vows, learns that she has an aunt living in a nearby city. The orphan shows no curiosity but her Mother Superior obliges her to visit this aunt before devoting her life to Christ. The orphan’s name is Anna, but upon meeting Aunt Wanda, a former state prosecutor, Anna learns that her real name is Ida, and, what’s more, that she’s Jewish. A revelation under any circumstance—especially if you’re about to become a nun!—but this is Poland, 1962, where being the orphaned daughter of Jews automatically supposes a link one to the single greatest atrocity of the 20^th century. Ida’s parents disappeared during the war, and hardboiled Wanda has just enough information and just enough sympathy for her reticent niece to initiate what will become something of a road movie and something of a detective story, a journey to unearth the truth about Ida’s parents.

Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) and written by Pawlikowski and British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Ida, clocking in at a trim yet unhurried 80 minutes, unfolds in the exquisite, captivating manner of a precisely sculpted novella. Every scene is infused with quiet mystery, yet in hindsight every moment is essential. Credit for the mystery and compaction both should be divided between numerous artists, of which I’ll name just a few. Ida is played by Agata Trzebuchowska, Wanda by Agata Kulesza. With her opaque, liquid eyes refusing entry, that chin dimple like the mark of some chosen one, and those wide, childlike planes of her face always catching the ashen winter light, Trzebuchowska is a presence at once luminous and demure. Kulesza conveys a wizened weariness that gradually shifts from sly cynicism toward something more heartbreaking. Ida and “Red Wanda” make a fascinatingly idiosyncratic pair, one a genuine innocent protected from earthly vice by her stoicism and nun’s habit, the other a lonely, cold-eyed if still seductive woman somewhere on the far side of middle-age who smokes too much, drinks too much, and sleeps with men out of habit—a character made by complicated by her past participation in the 1950s show trials that brought opponents of socialism to their knees.

Confined—and liberated too—by the boxy, Academy ratio frame, Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski’s stunning silvery black and white cinematography frequently places the characters at the bottom of the image, leaving space overhead for architecture, freshly dug earth or the heavens to loom like some elusive god, uncertain future or harrowing family legacy. Before it even begins Wanda teasingly warns that their journey might end with Ida discovering that there is no God. And indeed, as this story makes its serpentine way there are moments when faith seems in question and unholy new routes open themselves for Ida. Whatever routes she follows, whatever distance she travels, there is however always a sense that Ida is about wayward paths to devotion. And to self-realization, for this young orphan, and for a country still reeling from one trauma and deep in the grips of another.

           

Vision: this nun won't take nein for an answer

The titular 12th century Benedictine magistra and mystic of writer/director Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen was a preternatural renaissance woman of the highest order, writing plays, botanical and theological texts, composing music, and founding an independent, all-woman monastery on her way to canonization, feminist revisionism and cinematic stardom. While scandalizing her peers, she was deft in her dealings with both church and state. But she was human like anybody else and suffered from longings and envy, which allows Vision to see-saw engagingly between the steady accumulation of its protagonist’s accomplishments and her occasional surrender to overwhelming emotions.

There’s a superfluous and fairly silly prologue involving a millenarian sect gathering to mark the last night of the first millennium and its implicit apocalypse. But the sun insistently rises the next morning and the world’s stage is set for von Bingen’s entrance… about 98 years later. Von Trotta quickly dramatizes von Bingen’s childhood cloistering before darting ahead 30 years to the moment when she assumes the role that will facilitate her destiny as maverick and renown polymath. Around this point we catch a glimpse of von Bingen’s visions, replete with sudden zooms into our heroine’s supernaturally blue eyes and psychedelic cloud formations. It would seem advisable to regard such religious experiences as best left to the imagination, but von Trotta’s approach to this material generally feels ambivalent about whether to mime it’s subject’s austerity or follow Ken Russell’s example as to how to shoot nuns: on the one hand Vision is almost elliptical in its efficient rendering of biographical bullet points; on the other it employs expressionistic hand-held camerawork and contemporaneous but decidedly non-diegetic choral music that could furnish several Omen sequels.

“God loves beauty,” declares von Bingen in Vision, and the proof is manifested in von Bingen herself, embodied here by the positively ageless Barbara Sukowa in her fifth collaboration with von Trotta, the pair of them having forged their careers four decades back as important figures in the New German Cinema. Sukowa makes an agreeably radiant visionary, though her beauty doesn’t distract from the character’s chaste integrity. For secular viewers at least, Vision will feel most alive when von Bingen throws a bit of a tantrum upon discovering that her young protégée, also rather fetching, will be leaving her for another convent. There’s nothing beyond our own suspicions to imply anything erotic transpiring between the two during those long, lonely Dark Age nights, but perhaps there’s no harm in us having our own visions of transgression nonetheless.