Unlike the films of the Polish director Anjj Vajda that we are familiar with. "Sister Ida" does not directly describe the historical suffering of Poland, and director Paul Pavlikovsky sketches an ordinary story of Poland after the war with extreme restraint. It is far-fetched to tell this story, a journey to find the roots of a Polish Jewish girl in the 1960s, and the positioning of the film is not only ordinary, but also slightly niche.
After the Holocaust of Polish Jews since World War II, and then the anti-Semitic cleansing of Eastern European countries led by Stalin in the 1950s and 1960s. The Polish Jews depicted in the film in the 1960s are already ethnic minorities, but through this root-seeking story about Jews, it is still relevant to depict Poland under socialist rule as a whole after the war.
The story of Anjj Vajda is always eager to tell you what happened in Poland, and his images are direct and extremely impactful. At the beginning of the Katyn Massacre, a group of Poles are crowded on a bridge because of their escape, and are chased by the Germans, while spies in the front come to report that the Soviets have been killed. Vajda tells the audience about the suffering of Poland in a straightforward plot. "Sister Ida" is different, the film is always shrouded in an oppressive atmosphere, black and white images plus a large number of picture blanks to create a cold temperament, coupled with the film's restrained plot makes the audience feel the Polish people's post-war trauma and crisis of faith. Vajda's images are externalized and straightforward, suitable for depicting the fate of Poles, and this film is restrained and cold, which is suitable for expressing the crisis of Polish faith and the trauma of history.
Sister Ida is a Jewish girl, whose original name is Ida Lebenstein, and a Jew whose name contains "Stan" is Catholic, which is itself the biggest religious contradiction. And this contradiction and entanglement in faith runs through the entire film. Poland was under socialist rule at the time, and poles had already experienced a crisis of faith in communism. At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev issued a secret report on the cult of personality and its consequences, which vigorously criticized Stalinism, followed by a crisis of faith throughout Eastern Europe, typified by the "Polish-Hungarian Incident" that we Chinese are familiar with, and poles began to take to the streets to demand the correction of the crimes committed by the Stalinist government, which ended with the return of Gomulka to power. Poland's geographical location was not only at the forefront of the confrontation between East and West, but also the most sensitive area of religious conflicts. Ida was a Jew and was religiously on the same page as Catholicism, but it was because of this Catholic monastery that Ida escaped. For her only relative, Aunt Wanda Guz, the Judaist faith suffered from the atheism of the Communists, whose entanglement created a vacuum in faith, and her aunt was a hedonistic nihilist. Her aunt had always been dismissive of her niece's faith, and as a Jew, she would never go to the convent to see her niece, and when Ida wanted to visit the graves of her parents, her aunt warned her, "What if you go and find that God does not exist?" And when they were holding the remains of their loved ones and preparing to bury them in the family grave, Ida thought "we should find a priest" but her aunt dismissively objected to "You mean rabbi." While her aunt smoked and drank and fucked between men and women, Ida was an ascetic nun who was about to take an oath, in her aunt's words, "I'm a slut, and you're a saint." Aunt Ida's rebuttal to her own rotten life upset Ida, "Your Jesus loves people like me" Aunt asked Ida to look through the Bible's description of Mary Magdalene, which is what we are familiar with "Whoever among you has no sin can stone her." Ida remains a staunch Catholic on the surface, but inside there is a crisis of faith. She muttered to herself to the statue of Jesus she had placed herself, "I can't swear, I'm not ready," and when her aunt committed suicide because of a crisis of faith, she decided to try a different life, she put on her aunt's high heels and dress, and had a relationship with the boys. We see that at the end of the film, Ida leaves the boy and puts on the nun's clothes, she walks on the road, where to go, where her soul is placed, we don't know.
Ida and her aunt have such different lives and beliefs in this life, a slut, a saint, and this black and white corresponds to the black and white images of the film. It is worth noting that two beautiful things in color are mentioned in the film, one is Ida's beautiful red hair, and the other is the stained glass installed by Ida's mother in the cowshed. Both of these things are highlighted in the film, but the director still insists on expressing them in black and white images, so the only two bright colors remain only in the audience's imagination, so this bright color that only remains in the audience's imagination is more intelligent than the abrupt red color in Spielberg's "Schindler's List".
The director not only paranoidly expresses the whole film with black and white images, but his shooting angle is more commendable. Many of the main perspectives of the film are always in the position below one-third of the picture, which is rarely seen in the history of film, and the impression first appears in Chen Kaige's "Yellow Land" and "Child King", the focus of the film is below one-third of the picture, or the horizon of the picture is at the subtitle of the picture, and above the picture is a large blank space, either the sky or the blank wall of the room. This kind of blank photography unique to Chinese painting, the director of this film uses a lot, and there is no sense of violation, creating an ethereal and desolate atmosphere in the film. What is even more surprising is that the film uses horizontal and vertical lines to outline a smooth and solemn picture, such as Date and the young man are in the front of the picture below, and behind them are the windows with regular lines; there are pictures of hospitals and hotels, and the horizontal and vertical lines of doors, windows and square floors are neat and regular, making the whole picture look clean and solemn, as sacred as a temple. The composition of the film is not too neat and dull, for example, the middle of the picture is a symmetrical monastery, the whole composition is stable and solemn, and Ida is in the lower right of the picture, and she walks down until she walks out of the picture. The unstable elements in this stable composition, or the deliberate deviation from the performance position, can always hint at where the center of gravity of the audience's picture is.
Through the contrast between the lives of Ida and his aunt, the film depicts the widespread crisis of faith in Poles, and successfully creates a cold and contradictory heart with black and white photography and elaborate composition. The film achieves a perfect unity in content and form.
