Fata Morgana
Deckel Edged
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2005
- Posts
- 32,606
I saw this film last night and it blew me away. Now I know this won't be everyone's cup of tea, it's black and white, it's Polish with subtitles and its very stark and spare. Nevertheless, it's beautiful and visually stunning.
From The Telegraph:
The film begins with spare, hushed scenes of ritual among nuns in early Sixties Poland. It takes just a handful of shots to establish the daily life of the main character, a novice called Anna (newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska), before she’s whisked from her calling on an unexpected and potentially life-changing errand.
Anna is soon to discover that she was born Jewish, christened Ida, that her parents disappeared during the war, and that her sole surviving relative is an aunt called Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a fierce, chain-smoking magistrate who has waited all this time to acknowledge their kinship. She has reasons for this, Wanda, being a lost and depressive soul who can't screw or drink enough to make the pain go away.
She’s also, thanks to the magnificently vinegary and vital Kulesza, better company than you could possibly imagine. The two must go on a pilgrimage into the countryside, to uncover where, or even whether, their relatives were buried, and by whom, when Ida was abandoned into the nuns’ care. Wanda, quite unbidden, becomes this film’s equivalent of Claude Lanzmann – the documentary-maker who prowled the unyielding turf of rural Poland in Shoah, asking all the difficult questions, swatting off evasion with deadly insinuation.
There’s something eerily perfect about it, quite complete. Nothing is scrimped on – certainly not the sound design, which makes the most of people trying to make very little noise: the nuns over their soup bowls, Ida making a stealthy escape from the new man in her life. The wind drops in a forest when Poland’s secrets are literally unearthed, and the film’s most haunting effect is audible for a microsecond – it's the soft, hollow, and tenderly muffled rattling of bones.
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a97/foxkitsune/ida_3050922b_zpsb2c997e1.jpg
I can't recommend this one enough. I loved it even more than Fury.
From The Telegraph:
The film begins with spare, hushed scenes of ritual among nuns in early Sixties Poland. It takes just a handful of shots to establish the daily life of the main character, a novice called Anna (newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska), before she’s whisked from her calling on an unexpected and potentially life-changing errand.
Anna is soon to discover that she was born Jewish, christened Ida, that her parents disappeared during the war, and that her sole surviving relative is an aunt called Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a fierce, chain-smoking magistrate who has waited all this time to acknowledge their kinship. She has reasons for this, Wanda, being a lost and depressive soul who can't screw or drink enough to make the pain go away.
She’s also, thanks to the magnificently vinegary and vital Kulesza, better company than you could possibly imagine. The two must go on a pilgrimage into the countryside, to uncover where, or even whether, their relatives were buried, and by whom, when Ida was abandoned into the nuns’ care. Wanda, quite unbidden, becomes this film’s equivalent of Claude Lanzmann – the documentary-maker who prowled the unyielding turf of rural Poland in Shoah, asking all the difficult questions, swatting off evasion with deadly insinuation.
There’s something eerily perfect about it, quite complete. Nothing is scrimped on – certainly not the sound design, which makes the most of people trying to make very little noise: the nuns over their soup bowls, Ida making a stealthy escape from the new man in her life. The wind drops in a forest when Poland’s secrets are literally unearthed, and the film’s most haunting effect is audible for a microsecond – it's the soft, hollow, and tenderly muffled rattling of bones.
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a97/foxkitsune/ida_3050922b_zpsb2c997e1.jpg
I can't recommend this one enough. I loved it even more than Fury.
