Ida (***1/4)

A lot of filmmakers, after making a splash with an independent or small-budget hit, will move on to blockbuster fare, but Pawel Pawlikowski has done the opposite. Best known for the English romance My Summer of Love, Pawlikowski has returned to his native Poland and made a black-and-white drama about a young woman (Agata Trzebuchowska) on the verge of taking her vows as a Catholic nun. Having grown up in the convent, she is only now being told she has a living relative, an aunt (Agata Kulesza). The aunt she never knew tells her about the parents she never knew, who were Jews who died, or were killed, during World War II.

In the course of this concisely told tale, these very different women together try to find out what happened. The contrast of personalities is about the only thing Ida has in common with My Summer of Love. Asked if she’s ever had impure thoughts, Ida says yes, but not carnal ones. Too bad, the aunt says, because it’s not much of a sacrifice if you don’t know what you’re giving up. The sheltered girl and the hard-edged, hard-drinking aunt make a sort of good-cop, bad-cop pairing, though Pawlikowski does not use this to humorous effect, as another filmmaker might have.

Instead, the style is composed and steady; the unbeautiful views of rural and small-town Poland of the 1960s create a visual impression as strong as My Summer. The ending seems possibly headed for melodrama, but Pawlikowski reins it in, concluding the story in a way that may or may not be what the viewer will want to happen, but that seemed to make sense.

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viewed 6/11/14 7:35 pm and posted 6/11/14

Doubt (***3/4)

Since I saw this movie, I’ve seen a preview for it that makes Meryl Streep’s nun character look like a shrew trying to railroad a forward-thinking priest, and a television commercial that makes her seem like a crusader for justice working against a male hierarchy that would like to whitewash the truth. These attempts to shoehorn the plot into mutually exclusive thrillers inadvertently point to the brilliance of director John Patrick Shanley’s tightly constructed script. Streep, who plays a primary-school headmistress, seems to embody the sort of nasty old Catholic school nun that makes up clichés about nasty old Catholic school nuns.

Invoking fear in both students and her fellow sisters, she is almost a caricature of sternness, so conservative that in 1964 she still cannot abide ballpoint pens. When she suspects something untoward about the kindness of the priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) toward the school’s only black student, is she not simply biased against his more liberal theology? Turn the question around and it becomes, does being biased, or not likeable, make her wrong? In the end, this movie is a drama, not a thriller, and the title is exactly on point. So the question is not whether the priest is guilty but how sure of herself does her accuser need to be before going forward, when being wrong in either direction may have significant consequences.

In the most emotional scene of the movie, the student’s mother spells out some of the less-expected consequences. Viola Davis, in this small role, nearly steals the scene from Streep, who is nonetheless quite good. (Additionally, her character turns out to be more complex than she seems, though the very last line of the movie still seems out of character, and unsubtle.) Amy Adams, well cast as a younger nun, serves as an audience surrogate whose sympathies and suspicions battle each other.

Shanley won an Oscar for writing 1987’s Moonstruck, but his only directorial effort was 1990’s offbeat Joe Versus the Volcano. Neither of those movies would prepare you for this adaptation of Shanley’s play, which has already copped both a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shanley hasn’t taken great efforts to “open up” the play, though it makes lovely use of period locations and detail in evoking the Brooklyn of 1964. It’s a cinch for a screenplay Oscar nomination as well.

IMDB link

viewed 12/2/08 (screening at Bridge); reviewed 12/18/08

Bad Habits (***)

The title is a goofy pun, considering that this somber drama only rarely means to be funny. It refers, partly, to one lead character’s attempts to lost weight, by starvation and exercise, and equally obsessive efforts to combat her young daughter’s slight pudginess. Her husband, meanwhile, finds a sensuality in food and is repelled by her increasingly thinness. “Habits” also refers to those worn by nuns, one of whom seems to feel that she will halt the torrential rains flooding Mexico City by starving herself.

First-time director Simón Bross fills the screen with striking images of rain, of food, and of flesh. The pace is on the slow side, but it didn’t bother me. The attempts to cobble together all of these stories of food and obsession may be, pardon the second pun, half-baked, but the artistry somewhat conceals the artifice.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/08; reviewed 4/11/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival