Ida (M). Director: Pawel Pawlikowski. Starring: Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata Kulesza. 80 minutes
Circle the block from the Classic Cinemas in Elsternwick, and halfway you'll encounter a horror wrought in bronze. This suburb in Melbourne's south-east has a large Jewish population, and so it seems a natural home for the Jewish Holocaust Centre — part education centre, part museum and part memorial to vast 20th century trauma. Andrew Rogers' silicon bronze sculpture Pillars of Witness, which flanks the entrance to the centre, solidifies this trauma.
The peaks of these slender monoliths are cast as reaching, tortured limbs or tortuous razor wire. The lower sections are studded with panels that depict in ghastly detail the sites of trauma: urban spaces invaded by Nazi villains; concentration camps bursting with degraded humanity; mass graves dense with wasted torsos and limbs. In one scenario, a man kneels at the lip of such a grave, as a Nazi trains a gun at the back of his head.
So vivid is Rogers' depiction — the weary resignation of the victim, the cool, determined stance of his assailant, the insouciance of the soldiers gathered in the background, their expressions captured on moulded bronze faces half the size of your fingernail — that the observer tenses in anticipation of the gunshot, and of the sight of the man's corpse tumbling down to join the hundreds of other nameless corpses in the pit below.
Take a breath, bow your head, and return to the Classic, where today's screening is Ida. This Polish film holds the horrors of the Holocaust close in its recent memory (it is set in 1962), yet maintains an elegant stillness that resonates with the frozen chaos of Rogers' panels. Lukasz Zal's tranquil black-and-white cinematography is beautifully composed, belying the tumult of history and identity that ebbs beneath the surface.
If Ida's cinematic still waters run deep, that can equally be said of the central character (Trzebuchowska), an 18-year-old novice who, on the eve of taking her vows as a nun, discovers that she is Jewish. Trzebuchowska's large, expressive eyes pour emotion from an otherwise opaque expression.
Keep an eye on those eyes to fully appreciate the transformation the pious but naïve orphan Ida undergoes as she discovers her roots and seeks to, literally, uncover the bones of her past. And just try not to think about Rogers' mass graves as Ida encounters the smaller but no less horrifying reality of her own family history.
Ida's companion on