MOVING IMAGES
Is being too beautiful a problem? There are times, certainly, when it gets in the way. The well-reviewed movie Ida, the story of a young novitiate in 1950’s Poland who learns that her family is Jewish, is a good example. It’s photographed in stunning black and white and unfolds in mis-en-scene, slowly, cryptically, with little dialogue and explanation. It’s less a full-length movie than an array of dazzling shots, each one lit in a dreamy silver haze and composed with an angel’s eye, with all of its lonely characters, austere interiors, shadowy landscapes immaculately framed and rendered.
The visual schema is the movie’s chief virtue and also its chief problem. Because the stories it tells – about the hatred of Jews, about the complexities of identity, about the ravages of memory, about base self-preservation – are underdone by the superficial beauty of the images. We watch, enraptured by the string of lights at the hotel bar where the heroine has a sexual awakening, by the stray electrical cord cutting across the hospital corridor where an old man is dying, by the velvety texture of the soil tumbling into a child’s grave. Yet these moments of astonishing beauty all remain static. The movie, and its characters, never break outside the frame or outside our expectations; they stay rooted in the composition. This movie doesn’t really move.
Because of its serious look and story Ida has been compared to European art films from the 50’s and 60’s. But its look reminded me more of 80’s Jim Jarmusch, like Stranger than Paradise. And when Ida and her brassy, hard-drinking, chain-smoking aunt drive to the country to find her parents’ grave, the movie begins to feel like a Jim Jarmusch movie too: and odd couple fish-out-of-water road movie. But Ida is so tasteful and so humorless that it lacks the simple pleasures of that kind of entertainment. Its arch elegance and elliptical storytelling gloss over the ugly uncertainties, and potential explosiveness, of human emotions, of which there would be plenty here, if only they had been expressed directly. There is one death depicted in the movie, and it plays out so handsomely and so seamlessly that it doesn’t even sting.