Ida (12A)
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
Four stars

PAWEL PAWLIKOWSKI was hailed as the future of socially aware cinema with his exercise in magical realism, My Summer of Love.

That was a coming-of-age story of two pubescent girls from opposite backgrounds in an environment where the sun always seems to shine.

Yet he employs a much starker and austere palette in Ida, set in his native Poland,  and it’s a film sharply realised in Jaroslaw Kaminski’s black-and-white cinematography.

Located in the 1960s, it tells the story of young novitiate num Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) who before taking her vows is told by her superior that she must visit her family.

So Anna travels to see her aunt Wanda, played by the excellent Agata Kulesza, who was a judge and former prosecutor and who’s also something of a cynical communist party official. Not averse to the sins of the flesh, she’s something of a dipsomaniac too.

She reveals that Anna’s actual name is Ida and that her Jewish parents were murdered during WWII. When Ida decides to find out where they’re buried she and Wanda embark on a journey which takes in a visit to a hotel where a bluesy jazz band plays. Ida is seduced in every sense of the word.

Both women — characterised by Wanda  as “the slut and the saint” — are on a journey which confronts their past and which will decide their futures.

Ida is a quasi-political parable about the nazi era in Poland, those who collaborated with it or resisted, and the ongoing consequences.

These are riddled with even more complex issues, given Poland’s history of political expediency and turning a blind eye to recent historical realities.

Any audience ignorant of the fuller picture won’t be satisfied with such a lack of context, which has led to the legacy of fascism aligning with Nato.

Pawlikowski says Ida is a project he intends to update.

Let’s hope he deals with questions like this, and the revolutionary rigour required to answer them, should he do so.