Jesus for the Disillusioned: Reflections on the Award-Winning “Ida”

I watched 2014 Polish film Ida, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The movie, set in 1962 Poland and shot in stark black-and-white, is about a young novice (preparing to become a nun), Anna, who is on the verge of taking her final vows to the Lord in a Roman Catholic religious order. With only a week before her vows, Mother Superior sends Ida to meet her aunt Wanda, who is her only living relative. [Spoiler alert. Movie happenings revealed in coming paragraphs!] Through her aunt, Anna discovers that she is actually Jewish, and that her given name is Ida. Her family, save Wanda, was murdered in the Holocaust. Wanda is a communist party insider who survived the Holocaust (likely by fleeing to the Soviet Union) and served as a prosecutor in post-war Poland. She is also a sexually promiscuous, chain-smoking alcoholic (At one point, Wanda, feeling “judged” by Ida’s piety, says to her, “Your Christ adored people like me”). The story revolves around Ida’s journey of self-discovery, which takes her on the road with an angry, vindictive Wanda (who we discover had a child, Ida’s older cousin, who was killed along with Ida’s parents) in search of her parents’ grave (In another interesting scene, Wanda asks Ida, “What if you go there [her parents’ grave] and discover that there is no God?”). Ida is at once repelled yet intrigued by Wanda’s lifestyle, and her dormant sexuality is aroused by a young Coltrane-inspired saxophone player they meet on the road. While discovery of her Jewish identity, visiting the graves of her parents, and even hearing the confession of her parents’ murderer (who also, in a painful paradox, is the one who took Ida to the convent), is significant, it is the hedonistic sensually of her aunt and the sexual tension with the saxophone player provokes a crisis for Ida. After the discovery of her parents’ grave, Ida returns to the convent, and in a moving scene, just before she is to take her final vows, Ida circles a statue of Jesus, the statue erected by the sisters in the opening scene, and says simply, “I’m sorry, I’m not ready.” After a tearful Ida sits in the back of the church watching her fellow novices take their vows, Ida moves to the city and, essentially, “tries on” her aunt’s lifestyle, and this just after Wanda meets a shocking end. Ida smokes, drinks, and, after trading her novice’s dress and habit for a party dress and heels, finds her saxophonist and spends the night with him. In a vulnerable “morning-after” conversation, Mr. Saxophone (he’s never named) invites Ida along to their next gig near the shore. When he asks her if she’s ever been, she responds, “I’ve never been anywhere”. He goes on to suggest that they might spend the rest of their life together: marriage, kids, and even a dog. Ida’s response is the climax of the movie: “What then?” The next scene shows Mr. Saxophone asleep, and Ida dressing in her novice’s habit once more, and the film ends with Ida on a road, an unknown road, walking toward the camera. We don’t know where Ida is walking, but she is determined. It could be back to the convent, or it could be out in the country where her parents lived, or it could be . . . anywhere. This is the moment, I believe, of both hope and opportunity. It seems to me that Ida rejected the life of hedonism (hence the return to her novice habit), and also the banality of a “conventional” life of marriage and family (hence her profound question, “What then?”) It could be that she was rejecting life in the convent as well, and, if so, this could communicate a rejection of “religion,” although narrowly understood. It could also be that, after finding both the hedonistic and the bourgeois lifestyle wanting, she was ready to make her vows to Jesus after all. Communism was soul-crushing and hypocritical, hedonism was ultimately destructive, and conventional bourgeois life was empty, leading nowhere. Maybe Ida, like many in our communities, had rejected “religion” per se, but I wonder if, after her journey of self-discovery, the Jesus to whom her colleagues were making lifelong vows of intimacy, and the Jesus who “adored” people like her aunt, might be worth another look. I wonder how many people in our neighborhoods, offices, fantasy football leagues, gyms, kids’ soccer programs, or, even in our churches, might be disillusioned with politics, beaten down by self-medication with “stuff,” and disappointed by the American Dream? I wonder if they might be ready, borrowing a phrase (but not the meaning) from a book by the late Marcus Borg, to meet Jesus again for the first time? I believe that it is God’s call to church today, in our place and time, to find out.