Ida (2013)

If you've been injecting your yearly dose of best-of-year lists then you've already had Ida recommended to you many times. Below is the best argument I could come up with for why Ida isn't one of the best films of the year (but why so many people thought it was).

The story is simple, as is everything in the movie (its greatest asset): a young nun (Anna), before taking her vows, visits her aunt (Wanda) who she's never met. Wanda is the antithesis of a nun: she smokes and screws guys she doesn't know and gets jailed for drink driving. The two set out on a trip around Poland so Anna can find out about the parents she never met. 

It's easy to see why critics wanted to love this one (and why I'm sure some of them genuinely did): it's slow, pondering, black and white and its themes and main points of concern have to come from the viewer's head, because the movie is too polite to point them out. To stamp your giant critic stamper of approval on this one must say something good about film as a medium, and maybe even something about you as an intellectual too. And no one has questioned this because Ida is nowhere near as boring as the black and white nun movie your mind formulates when you hear the premise. The two main characters seem set for the same highs and lows as the average American feel-good road trip movie: two opposing characters going on a personal journey where they'll surely learn a lot about themselves from each other. 

Ida is only good in theory though. The emotional moments are there, only they're static. The filmmakers knew they had some weighty moments, some big things to happen, so they didn't seem to bother actually making them emotional. Same as the way the film was shot. Reviewers can't stop pointing out this film's "beauty" (and every other word their thesaurus tells them to write) and I won't argue with that. There's something static and cold about the cinematography: it captures the briskness of 60s Poland, and the cold indifference Anna seems to receive from almost everybody. But the framing, the exactities of every composition, which critics have been so excited to point out, are just as cold and static as the story becomes. There's mise en scene in real life, and I'd find it hard to argue that the best filmmakers make it seem like the frames they create - simple or complex - are just a lucky filmmaker landing on such a composition by accident, despite how un-accidental it usually all is. Characters in Ida stand awkwardly so the framing can look good and smart; it's a whole film that feels static and unmoving - a filmmaker who knows what is good, what's good story and good cinematography and good acting, but doesn't have the skill to work them in with any finesse. 

I didn't enjoy most of Ida (although it had its moments), only admired it as I imagine only someone really interested in film would.