From La Strada to the Hours: Suffering or Sovereign Femininity in Feature Films—Ida and Her Mothers

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s black-and-white film Ida is a delicate story of maturation, liberation, and self-discovery but also about the birth of female identity. Viewers are captivated by the on-screen transformation of the novice Anna on the verge of coming of age. We witness what psychoanalysis would call a ‘psychological birth’. We learn that Anna is an orphan and the film’s narrative stimulates us as viewers to create and reinvent the mother in the story to help her grow up. We witness three incarnations of the inner image of the mother, each of which plays a role in Anna’s formation as a person and a woman. In Christianity, and especially in Catholicism, the Church is often referred to as ‘mother’ because of its function of nurturing and supporting the faithful, an abstract, omnipotent mother, without a face and without a feeding breast, and an absolute mother from whom it is impossible to separate, because she is everywhere. From this mother who seduces with a blissful state of disembodied safety and contentment, Anna must separate to grow up and become a woman. Ruja, the woman who gave birth to her, is the lost mother. She gave her daughter not only a name, Ida, but also a sense of bodily integrity and security. Ida, for that is her name, has created a primary image of the mother but also a primary femininity transferred by the mother from her earliest days. Wanda is the found mother in real life. She is the living connection to the female world that liberates femininity, sexuality and love. The conflict between the woman and the nun, between the sensual and the immaculate, between the love that needs an object and the love that seeks fusion with it or between separation and symbiosis keeps us in front of the screen. Viewers are captivated by the timid manifestations of the unconscious femininity despite the taboos imposed by the Church. Ida’s story proves to us that the strongest aspect of human nature is the ability to connect with one another and to draw on that to develop and grow. It is something we clearly do better with each other, rather than with God. The black-and-white retro aesthetic and chamber composition, however, lack the optimism of growth and development. Melancholy inheres in the lack of passion, joy and genuine interest in life, in the sadness, resignation and greyness. All the senses through which we experience the film and its images and music, evoke feelings of sympathy, sadness and longing for what is missing—the mother.