Paweł Pawlikowski (Poland, born 1957)

Ida (2013)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Ida is a Polish film that is, like Tabu, completely in black-and-white. It’s set in 1962, and the spectre of the Holocaust less than two decades before hangs, largely unspoken, over every frame.

Ida is a good film. It’s just good. It’s poised, it’s classy, it’s understated. It’s accomplished. It’s cohesive. It’s visually striking. It deals with its weighty themes deftly and gracefully.

There are many aspects of Ida that we have seen in other highly acclaimed films reviewed so far. One is a very stoic and softly-spoken lead character whose feelings and thought processes are largely withheld from those around them and, by extension, from the viewer. Another is a penchant for leaving certain narrative elements unexplained- in this case these are largely centred around our characters’ motivations, especially as we get into the movie’s third act.

These choices inevitably work better in some films than others. I thought they worked in Leviathan, not so much in A History of Violence or Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring. Ida is a film in which they work. In fact, everything works in Ida; there’s something pristine, almost perfect about its slender 80 minutes. David Denby of The New Yorker called it a ‘compact masterpiece’, and I concur, though the exact phrase that ran through my head when viewing it was ‘quiet masterpiece’, like a pearl, or, perhaps more pertinently, a small diamond, shimmering and extremely pretty but hard and unyielding.

There’s a lot of beauty in Ida- it’s an extremely well-shot film- but it’s chilly beauty, emphasised from the outset by snow, and reflected in its title character, whose delicate, elfin features and doe eyes look down disparagingly, often silently, on her aunt’s behaviour and lifestyle. It sometimes feels as if she’s judging the viewer disdainfully too. In the monochrome colour palette of the film, Agata Trzebuchowska’s piercing eyes look coal-black. Together, aunt and niece move through a world that is desolate and decayed, the horror of the Holocaust having pushed everything and everyone into complete numbness.

It’s a film that, with its subject matter, easily could have been overwrought, worthy, even histrionic. Not only does it manage to avoid these sorts of pitfalls, but it never goes near them at all. This is one of the many differences in the respective approaches of this movie and that of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, which did, to these eyes, appear precious and contrived.

The last act of Ida is, in its own quiet way, quite shocking (minor spoilers ahead). It subverts everything that came before it and puts the tone of the whole movie on the line. But it does so in a way that is so casual, weary even, that the viewer accepts it without question. There was a low-key but nonetheless very real sadness in the film’s closing moments which reminded me, conversely, of Fish Tank. I wrote that Fish Tank was ‘not interested in giving the audience exactly what they want, and leaving them with a nice warm glow,’ neglecting to mention that that film actually does end on a note of bittersweet catharsis- Mia escapes the council estate, with the trajectory of her life completely up in the air at that point, just like the balloon that is the final thing we see before we cut to black. Ida- older than the fifteen-year-old Mia, but not by much- essentially does the opposite, deciding that she doesn’t want the ‘escape’ she’s offered, and going the other way, choosing something much different.

Lis (Dawid Ogrodnik), Ida’s love interest, is a young man who is handsome, quietly charming, ostensibly perfectly decent, and self-assured without being arrogant or cocky. He’s even a creative type, a travelling musician. He’s exactly the kind of character which other, inferior films would have presented as the answer to Ida’s dreams, and the ‘escape’ he proposes as the neat culmination of a solid, insistently positive character arc that has come through obstacles and difficulties but prevailed through them. This ‘escape’, though, is suggested flatly, without feeling, like some sort of afterthought. Perhaps this is partly why she turns it down.

One gets the sense that even Lis won’t feel particularly broken when he wakes up in the morning and finds himself in an empty bed, even though it’s perfectly feasible that he will never sleep with a girl that beautiful ever again, let alone marry one. He will simply pick up his saxophone and travel to the next village, the next gig. It’s hard for anyone to feel much of anything after what the country’s been through. But this viewer feels that, at the very least, Ida should have gone to Gdansk with him. She should have gone to the beach.

The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

(Contains spoilers.)

This piece from Pawlikowski is an oddity. But it doesn’t behave like an oddity, and it doesn’t present itself as one- it pretends that it is a sleek, moody thriller, something like a more mature, serious, respectable iteration of Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction, without the trash and preposterousness.

Like Ida, this is a short piece that lasts around 80 minutes. For around two thirds of this- three quarters, maybe- it is all smoulder and build-up, as our main guy, Tom, an intellectual and writer played by Ethan Hawke, arrives in a new city in a country that is not his own and tries to establish some solidity and normalcy in his new setting whilst his situational circumstances seem to drag him deeper into a foreboding world of lawlessness and illicit, potentially dangerous entanglements with a pair of very different women.

So far, so passable. Then the final section goes off the rails. The events depicted deliberately and pointedly do not make sense, from any angle, and the only explanation that would cover it is that Tom is mad, has been mad from the beginning, and for some reason has been controlling it quite well for most of the movie’s runtime. Even then, that doesn’t explain how his mind has managed to conjure Margit (Kristen Scott Thomas), apparently a real person who really did exist before her death 15 years earlier.

Yeah. It’s one of those. His ex-wife has a restraining order against him- we’re never told what led up to it. We don’t even get to find out what Tom’s secretive security job was all about. When we get elements like this in a movie, and it’s not ultimately supposed to add up, the obvious reference point is Lynch, but for me, this doesn’t feel like a Lynch movie at all. There are no dancing dwarves or alien-lizard babies. There’s no Dean Stockwell lip-synching to Roy Orbison. It’s just not that sort of film. It’s quieter and sadder than your typical Lynch piece, and presents its befuddling climax to us with weary, doleful elegance, still furtively wearing the same stylish steamy-thriller cloak it’s had on all along.  

When a piece provides a twist on a recognised formula, it forces the viewer, especially the analytical one, to consider the formula anew, perhaps by looking at the different ways that it might potentially have been modified in the first place, and then subsequently the direction that the piece in question has chosen to go in and how well it eventually all coalesces. Are the judgements sound? Is it all ‘worth it’ in the end? The Cabin in the Woods springs to mind, which I enjoyed immensely- its witty and ultimately quite scabrous commentary on lazy, tepid horror films was something which I found very clever and very funny. But for one thing, that movie acknowledged far more overtly what it was doing and which particular area it was forcing itself into. For another, the adult-oriented erotic thriller genre, indebted to classic noir, is perhaps not as easy to parody or subvert- if that is in fact what The Woman in the Fifth was trying to do, which I can’t say with anything approaching certainty.

What I can say is that this puzzle-piece was not, all in all, particularly notable, and did not, I feel, achieve anywhere near the kinds of artistic heights scaled by Ida, which it pre-dates. Perhaps with this film, Pawlikowski was somewhat ‘warming up’ for the movie that could well turn out to be his magnum opus. Or perhaps he was quite happy to punctuate his oeuvre with a minor work that seems to exist simply to strike a specific note- one that is mordant, off-key, and thoroughly perplexing.

Cold War (2018)

Cold War concerns Wiktor, a composer and musician, and Zula, a singer, two Poles who meet at a casting call in the aftermath of the war. Like everyone else in this society, they appear to be trying to ‘rebuild’- to scratch together a bit of money, and to stoically make whatever they can out of the tattered remnants of their lives. The love they may feel for each other may, then, act as a potential tonic.

I guess we already know that the two of them aren’t simply going to form a courtship and live happily ever after. We wouldn’t really have much of a film if they did, and a movie like this always has very different sorts of emotional and philosophical investigations in mind.

The comparisons one can make with this film and Ida are pretty clear. They are both in black and white. They both have a stark, bare runtime of 80 minutes. They are both focused on the natural and sociocultural landscape of post-war Poland. They have both got acute, overarching melancholy running insistently and resolutely through their veins. And they both showcase a very pointed blend of bleak desolation and overt beauty.

The two films’ biggest difference might primarily be in that this one takes place over several years, so its focus is much broader, and this larger scale is also echoed both by elaborate musical set-pieces and a heightened tension compared to Ida’s undeniably grave but relatively relaxed tone- a tension that constitutes a constant threat to the two lovers, who never seem able to stay in the same place for too long.

There were many things I liked and admired about this movie. Certainly on at least one level, it is a huge success. As an art film that has been directed with a firm hand and is centred around two excellent performances, it is practically faultless, and within that bracket it comes highly recommended. Also, if there is any film that explains why a filmmaker might choose to shoot in black and white, it’s this one. It is absolutely ravishing. It’s gorgeous. I can barely imagine any movie looking any better. Trains rattling through the rundown rural backwaters of a broken Poland are imbued with the same poised beauty as its two leads, who look every inch the classic movie-star couple from the golden age of Hollywood.   

However, when it comes to Cold War’s narrative content, the tragic love story, I didn’t feel much emotional impact. For one thing, I didn’t really like either of the two main characters, and though I can’t really say I liked Ida much either, that felt different- we barely knew her, and her aloof impenetrability felt like a powerful stylistic choice in the context of that film. As I commented when reviewing Brokeback Mountain, any film that covers twenty years in its protagonists’ lives is apt to touch upon lost opportunity and wasted time, and of course this one does, and its evocative sense of sadness, while relatively minimal for me, nonetheless did have a certain amount of potency. But while the diegetic passage of decades helps to make the film feel even more sweeping and majestic than it already is, it also gives off the impression that this ‘love story for the ages’ is merely being dipped into at intervals, parceled out to us in fragmented bits and pieces; also, like Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, it also seemed to me that if this couple really wanted to be together, then they could find a way, despite the obvious difficulties.

I want to watch Cold War again, and I will do when I feel enough time has passed. One feels that a repeat viewing, with knowledge of how it is going to play out and the way in which it is going to get there, may iron out my small, niggling issues and improve upon the middling response I had to its narrative dynamic. I’m all for understatement and calm, extremely controlled filmmaking- controlled, in this case, almost to a fault- but it isn’t always going to have the exact effects that are desired, and for now, Cold War remains in my eyes a highly respectable but ultimately slightly frustrating entry in the pantheon of solemn European art cinema- one that, for all its many attributes, didn’t quite deliver.