Agata Trzebuchowska in a new film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski.
If you were to pause “Ida” after ten minutes and define its theme, you would guess that it’s about a young Catholic nun called Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska). Clad in a plain habit, she dwells in a Polish convent, chants in Latin, and helps carry a statue of Jesus through the snow. The Mother Superior addresses her as Anna. And yet you would be wrong. As soon becomes clear, she’s not a nun but a novice, preparing to take her vows. She’s not named Anna. And she’s not even Catholic. It’s a fitting start to a tale of constant wrongness—of taking wrong turns, making wrong assumptions, and inflicting wrongs terrible and small.
Anna’s only relative is an aunt, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza), whom she doesn’t know but whom she is sent to meet before taking her vows. (Is this common practice? A way of seeing the outside world, or saying farewell to it, before entering a closed religious order? We never find out.) As Anna leaves the timeless air of the convent for the city where Wanda lives, a context emerges: it is the early nineteen-sixties, and Poland is part of the Communist bloc. Anna arrives to find her aunt in her robe, with a man getting dressed in the next room. Wanda is middle-aged, dark-haired, still glamorous, not ravaged but lightly roughened by time. She drinks, sometimes straight from the bottle, and is never without a cigarette. You would mark her down as a poet, lush with love affairs, or a famous stage actress, clinging to major roles. “They didn’t tell you who I am? What I do?” she asks Anna.
The truth is unlikely, but Kulesza invests herself so utterly in the role of Wanda, and with such tireless authority and skill, that we believe in her from first to last. Wanda is a judge—formerly a state prosecutor, who by her own admission sent people to their deaths. She was a credit to the system: “Red Wanda, that’s me,” she says. At one point, the “Internationale” is played in her honor; at another, she is arrested for drunk driving, only for the policeman responsible to issue a craven apology the next morning. Moviegoers may be taken aback to encounter someone so layered, so dense with contradictions, and so rich in guises—first a stern arbiter in legal robes, then a chronic flirt in pearls and heels, dancing to jazz, and last a frightened figure hunched in the bath, looking stricken and suddenly old. Most novelists would kill to create her.
Nothing about Wanda, though, is as shocking as the news that she delivers to her niece. Anna’s real name is Ida Lebenstein. She was a Jewish child, taken from her parents in wartime and handed over to an orphanage, where she was raised with a new identity. Ida responds to this revelation as she responds to almost everything: with a daunting stillness, drilled into her by the disciplines of faith. But she has deep, dark eyes—time and again, the focus of the camera’s gaze—and they widen with perplexity and alarm. Wanda planned to return her to the convent, but, instead, the two women set off by car for a rural backwater, to discover how Ida’s parents died and, if necessary, to give them a decent burial. Thus, to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past. Nobody who knows Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” can forget the sequences filmed in Poland, some of them near former extermination camps. The implication of his findings remains endlessly troubling, and what “Ida” does is to pluck a single strand of suffering, about one family, from millions of possible stories. There is no outcry. The only evidence we see is a skull, dug from the soil, which Wanda wraps in her head scarf.
The director is Pawel Pawlikowski, who wrote the film with Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Born in Poland, he left as a teen-ager and was educated in Britain, where his early features, like “The Last Resort” (2000), were set. “The Woman in the Fifth” (2011), a doomy thriller with Ethan Hawke, took place in Paris. Little in that résumé prepares you for “Ida,” which could be construed as Pawlikowski’s homecoming. It is shot in black-and-white; the sun is no more than a weak spot in a foul sky. The format is in a ratio much narrower than we are used to, closer to a square than to a broad landscape. It used to be common; watch Polanski’s “Knife in the Water,” made in Poland in 1962, for a fine example. Nowadays, such constriction of the frame is used as a mark of antiquity (in “The Artist,” or in the older scenes of “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), whereas in “Ida” it functions as a moral tool. The Mother Superior would approve. More often than not, the characters—or merely their heads—appear at the foot of the screen, as if tugged down by gravity, dread, or the weight of an unappeased conscience. This is solemn filmmaking, devoutly restrained and unshakably purposeful. We expect its austerity to fend us off, but no; it gathers us in and forbids us to look away.
It is a rule of steel that any film about food should establish its credentials, as soon as possible, with a shot of ingredients being chopped at extraordinary speed. I remember Al Pacino, as a short-order cook in “Frankie and Johnny” (1991), going all Scarface on the celery to show what he could do. In this regard, “Chef” does not disappoint. Seconds into the movie, Jon Favreau—who writes, directs, and takes the leading role of Carl Casper—gets murderously busy with his blade. Fennel is the first victim, and then, to freak out any vegetarians in the audience, a pig gets it in the neck.
Carl is the head cook at a restaurant in Los Angeles. The owner is played by Dustin Hoffman, and the maître d’ by Scarlett Johansson. It’s that kind of restaurant. The action begins on a day made anxious by the fact that—Oh my God—a critic is coming. I love this idea. The next time a Superman film comes out, I’m definitely going to call the cinema beforehand and make sure that Clark Kent tries extra hard to save even more of the world than usual. Carl, likewise, decides to drop the regular menu, with its filet and its chocolate lava cake, and make something special—something seared by his soul. The owner says no, so Carl reverts to the normal dishes; the reviewer (Oliver Platt) tries them and trashes them; and Carl confronts him, using language much too salty for what is, in many respects, a sugar-dusted family movie. But why is Carl so peeved by the review when he has already made it explicit that the food he cooked, under orders, was not what he should be creating? Don’t the two enemies agree?
“Chef” now becomes something else. Carl loses his job, then flies to Miami with his son, Percy (Emjay Anthony), and his ex-wife (Sofia Vergara), seeking to restore his pride. An underling from L.A., Martin (John Leguizamo), comes to join him, and they fix up an old food truck, fit new stoves, and drive it back West, with Percy for company, dishing up top-grade fast food, in city after city, to lines of happy customers. Indeed, happiness gets tipped all over the movie like barbecue sauce. The near-paranoia of the first half is erased, making way for a lazy, upbeat ride, sprinkled with male bonding, while some of the actors—Hoffman, Johansson, and, as a grumpy sous-chef, Bobby Cannavale—simply drop out of sight. To be fair, the stuff handed out from the truck makes you want to lunge and grab, and Favreau realizes, I think, that the pornographic nicety of haute cuisine—overhead shots of fish and meat, in immaculate striplets, being laid atop glistening smears and foams—quickly loses its savor. That is why, after a while, he plumps for the portable and the chewable, like the Cubanos that Percy learns to paint with butter before toasting. If Favreau had to choose between Sofia Vergara and a grilled cheese sandwich, he would not, on the evidence of this movie, miss a beat.