I’m having trouble envisioning a top 10 Movies of 2014 list right now that doesn’t include Ida, a vibrant black and white picture that’s a quiet heartbreaker. Set in post-war Communist Poland, it’s essentially last year’s Philomena, just with teeth. It follows two generations of women, separated by circumstance and religion, as they track down the remains of their family tree left over from Nazi-occupation.
The most surprising thing about Ida is how light it can be on its feet. The black and white imagery makes the film’s interest in dichotomy apparent visually, as does the contrast between its two leads, the church mouse, soon-to-be-nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), and her vivacious but pragmatic aunt, Wanda (Agata Kulesza). Yet the film is tonally consistent throughout. The mood of the film reflects the elements of the scene: it can have suspense and intrigue one moment, and then quickly sneak in a laugh the next, because it plays by the rules of the road trip film, cataloguing random, chaotic life experience one mile and pit stop at a time.
It’s also an amazing directorial exercise, as Ida manages to do more with just one third of a given frame than most others can with the whole thing. Welles famously dug a whole to make Kane loom mightily over the screen, but director Pawel Pawlikowski will literally have his characters dig ditches to keep them confined to the bottom third. You know that game where you try to draw a house with an X through it without lifting the pen off the paper? Ida basically does that with its opening shots, placing the focal point of the shot in the bottom third, left third, right third, upper third, even diagonally from corner to corner, all in rapid succession. It’s incredible to watch, and tells you everything that’s not being said between the characters.
It even manages to play with subtitles in fascinating fashion, as moments of true revelation often shift the text from the bottom of the screen to the top. Shot of the year for me right now might just be a two-shot between Anna and a hunky, sax-playing suitor, they, filmed head-on against the outer wall of a pub, their conversation captured in small white text along a black beam hanging over them. It’s terrific, I really can’t recommend Ida highly enough.