A Story For November
What strikes me most strongly about a film I saw recently called Ida is how it gripped me in spite of the fact that the person the film is about remains such a mystery throughout. What is going on in her mind and heart is drip fed to us more in deeds and gestures more than in words. What she reveals about herself in the end can be understood only in terms our basic call to search for the Holy Grail and to answer the question it asks us: Whom does the Grail serve? But more about this below
The story of Ida
The story told in the film Ida takes place in Poland in 1962. Anna is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman preparing to become a nun. She has lived all her life in the convent where the nuns agreed to look after her when she was orphaned as a baby. She learns that she has a relative she must visit before taking her vows. The relative turns out to be her mother’s sister, Wanda and Anna soon finds out that she is a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor notorious for sentencing priests and others to death. She also finds out that their family is Jewish and that her real name is Ida. As a result of these revelations the two women set out on a journey to discover each other and what happened to their family. Ida has to choose between her birth identity and the religion that saved her from the massacres of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Wanda too must confront decisions she made in the past when she chose loyalty to the cause before her family.
A study of character nothing distracts us from
The setting of the story has all the starkness of winter. It is shot in black and white and we are surrounded throughout the film by the grey light of winter. The effect of this on the landscape is all around us and its chilliness gets into our bones. In this setting the backgrounds of Ida and Wanda gradually emerge. The film portrays for us the atmosphere of depression that followed the second world war and the takeover of Poland by the Russian communist regime. From films like, The Lives of Others we get some idea of how oppressive this takeover was. We do not encounter the people who ruled Poland at the time of the film but we do see the effects of their rule on the people Ida and Wanda meet on their journey; their lives are shrouded in silence as it is safer to say nothing about the present or the past.
Wanda herself is the closest we get to a revelation of what communism did to people. As a young woman she was an activist in the ‘revolution’ and became a ruthless judge notorious for handing down the death sentence. She is now bored with the system and has become rudderless and irresponsible, relying on alcohol to keep her going. The film focuses on these two Jewish women and we experience the immense guilt, fear and anger that surrounds the people they meet as they journey into the tragedy that surrounds their family. However, for all its sombre subject matter, there is warmth here too in the relationship between the two women at the centre of its focus; a warmth that is personal and spiritual as they grow in understanding of the very different worlds they live in.
The focus of the film
Nothing distracts us from the film’s focuses on these two contrasting pictures of Ida and Wanda; all else struggles to be seen in the landscape of the larger picture. Though the focus remains on these two woman those who are involved in their story are also the subject of intense scrutiny. How their whole person is involved in the way they love and relate or fail to do so means that we identify with them and the circumstances in which they lived as if we were living in the period in which the film is set. The portraits the film paints of these two woman is also a study of two contrasting visions of what life is about, two apposed sets of values and lifestyles; The stark contrast of these two cultures is personified by Wanda and Ida.
Two worlds portrayed by Wanda and Ida
The world that Wanda personifies is that of communist controlled Poland of the early 60s. We see how power has corrupted people in their loss of basic human values such as respect, tolerance and forgiveness. We see in the people they meet on their journey the depression that results from the fear, the guilt, and the frustration they live with. Ida on the other hand chooses to live in a place that, to the worldly eye of Wanda, seems dull and constricting; a waste of a life as she sees it. How Ida sees life and what she values remains a mystery and though we get to know more about her as the film comes to a close, what she reveals about herself is spoken more in deeds than words or in any show of emotion. We are left wondering what lies behind her intense dedication that pervades the film. We wonder whether it is because she is very young and has been brought up in the very unusual circumstances of a convent or whether behind her inscrutability she has a mind and heart of her own.
Our exposure to the circumstances in which she was reared is brief but what we see of it is humane but strictly regulated and devotional. It is like what I knew in the early 50s when I went to the seminary and had my enthusiasm challenged by the strict demands the system made on us. From the perspective of 60 years later however it seems cold and formal. There is humanity and respect in the way the mother superior treats Ida and the need she has to deal with her past even if this means leaving the safe confines of the convent where Ida is at home. The mother superior knows a lot more about Ida than we do and she must think a lot of her if she believes that Ida is strong enough to withstand the shock that living outside the environment of the convent will be.
A woman in search of the Grail
As she sets out on her very challenging journey we wonder if she has been programmed by being brought up in a convent and whether her strict and stoical attitude is but a protective shell that might crumble when she comes to realise that life outside the convent has attractive possibilities to offer, ones that she has not been aware of. The other alternative, and we suspect this is true, judging from her fierce determination to hold on to the way of life she has chosen, is that her heart is set on the essential Christian quest which is to seek the Holy Grail.
The Grail Legend
The Holy Grail is the chalice and platter used by Christ at the Last Supper. It is kept in the castle of the Grail King but since he is unaware of its presence he and his whole kingdom are afflicted by a debilitating illness that nobody seems capable of healing, and so the land lies desolate.
In a remote part of the kingdom there lives a simple, naive youth called Parsifal. On being trained as a knight he is given three rules to live by: He must not seduce or be seduced, and he must seek the Holy Grail. When he finds it he must seek an answer to the question, “Whom does the Grail serve?” With these instructions in mind Parsifal set off in search of the Holy Grail.
After many years searching he eventually meets the Grail King who invites him to his castle. When Parsifal fails to recognise the Holy Grail that resides in the castle and to ask the crucial question, the king is not healed and the land continues to be desolate. So Parsifal has to set out on his journey again and on it he is seduced by many things and diverted from his quest until after many wanderings he forgets all about the Holy Grail.
Eventually, he meets a hermit who absolves his sins and gives him instructions on how to find the Grail castle. When he finds it, he asks the vital question and receives the following answer,
The Grail must serve the Grail King.
As a result of becoming aware, with Parsifal’s help, of the Holy Grail and the need to devote himself to serving the One it represents the Grail King is healed. He and his kingdom are cured and their desolation gives way to joy as they learn to acknowledge the presence of the Holy Grail at the centre of their lives.
The ultimate quest
There is a hunger in each of us for love, for what above all else makes and sustains us as people who as made in “the image of God” are made for love. (Gn 1:28) Like Parsifal, we seek to satisfy this hunger we are for God in a multiplicity of ways. We allow ourselves to be seduced, for example, by ‘the good life’, by making something of ourselves in the eyes of the world or by irresponsibly drifting through life. However, if we are to be truly content, we must face the fact that nothing or no one can satisfy this essential hunger that must be put at the service of the Grail King and of the love he passionately wants to share with us. This is his love of us “to the end” that he invites us to remember at mass. (Jn 13:1) In the book called She that Robert Johnson wrote on the psychology of the feminine he makes this enlightening comment.
It is unjust to burden any human being with the expectation that he or she can satisfy our grail hunger.
People who give us an impression of what love is like
An intimate relationship with another person gives us a very valuable impression of what the Holy Grail is like and can make it a lot more real, tangible and credible. The person that offers Ida such a human experience of love is a young musician whom Wanda gives a lift to as she feels he may get Ida’s heart beating again. This good looking young man, let us call him David, plays in a band and represents the emergence of the rock culture and the world of the 60s. He thus represents something new at the time when young people began to voice again the joy of love and relationships as well as all the complexities and limitations of these. This emergence of the dream after the drabness of the post war years of the late forties and fifties was attractive for Ida as she sat listening to David and his band, though still dressed in her full habit and veil.
David became increasingly attractive as he sought to win her over and yet respected the possibility of her wanting to follow her religious vocation. His gentle and deferential approach draws her into an intimate relationship but she wants to be sure of where a life with him might take her. He answers her enquiries as best he can by offering to take her with him as he travels along the coast from gig to gig. They could he suggests walk the beech together in his time off. But she keeps asking, “What then?” In response he opens up a series of possibilities, such as getting married, having a child and buying a house but after each of them, her question remains, “What then?” When he falls silent Ida, seeing no further possibilities, puts on her habit, ties up her hair, puts on her veil, collects her suitcase and leaves the house where they are staying.
W B Yeats in his poem What then? echoes what the inner voice of Ida is saying to her when she persists with her questioning, “What then?” The poem voices the belief that any claim to worldly perfection or fullness is inevitably proven wrong by the philosopher’s ghost.
What then?
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”
Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”
All his happier dreams came true –
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”
“The work is done,” grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, “What then?”
The film ends with a prolonged sequence in which we are allowed to study Ida’s determined face as she heads back along the road, presumably to the place where she wants to live a life that promises her what she really wants. It interested me that the traffic on the road was all going in the opposite direction to that Ida had set her heart on following. She is not deterred as she is sure of what she has chosen; she has tasted the alternatives and found them wanting.
More about our inner journey in search of the Holy Grail
In two of my books I have followed up this question that I am always asking myself and those too who accompany me in life, the question, What do YOU want?
The Search For Something More seeks to answer this perennial question on a human level. It is based on Erik Erikson’s four calls of adult life: to identity, to intimacy, to be generative and to integrity or wisdom.
Follow Your Dream looks at life’s basic quest of the Holy Grail from a Christian point of view.
What do YOU want?
Under courses in the menu above you will find one called, What do YOU want? This is designed to helps you to explore the unique wisdom about life you have accumulated over the years. It works on the principle that if you seek to find a genuine answer to the question, What do you want? the best thing to do is to explore where you have been on your journey so far, for the further ahead you wish to see the further back you need go.