Cold War by director and cowriter Pawel Pawlikowski (
Ida) reminded me of classic early-'60s art films, but I hope by saying that I'm not damning with faint praise. This desperate love story, shot in luminous black and white, set in midcentury Eastern Europe and Western Europe, starring bohemians, is a quiet smoldering piece of fine work, often stunningly beautiful. It starts in Poland, with a movement toward authentic folk music that goes on to became a tool of Soviet propaganda. Impresario Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, looking like a Daniel Day-Lewis stunt double) is doing the Alan Lomax thing in Poland, combing the countryside for folk music, singers, and musicians, where he encounters Zula (Joanna Kulig), a singer with talent and a mysterious background. Almost instantly no surprise it's a case of Katie shut the front door: love, lust, pounding chests, heart signs on eyeballs, etc. Wiktor and Zula both have the talent to bond over making it professionally but their backgrounds bring them into personal conflict. He's well educated and middle-class, she is Russian, or lived in Russia, from the peasant class. We learn she had to fend her father off with a knife at some point and run away. She has the hard shell of a survivor. We never hear how it went for them in the war. Instead,
Cold War starts in 1949 when they meet and we follow the journey as Wiktor escapes to the West but Zula stands him up on that and they are separated practically from then on. Wiktor mewls a lot about "the love of my life" as he prowls the spectacular nighttime city streets of Europe and gets hustled around by sinister agents. Wiktor and Zula still see one another all the time, across the years, and then it's hot chemistry baby what is this thing, but they are going their separate ways too, growing apart. He has lovers and she is jealous, at one point she marries, then later she is married again to an unpleasant fellow we saw early, and they have a baby. Always there is music, good jazz in Paris, ravishing "folk" productions approximately as authentic as
Riverdance say, torch songs in nightclubs, even, in 1955, a somewhat hackneyed grope for "Rock Around the Clock" at a discotheque which is nonetheless effective in the moment.
Cold War might err on the side of being slight but it's really put together well.
Agreed with the last line: I got to see this at a screening in New York when visiting earlier this year and the film was gorgeous to look at; the compositions striking and Kulig of course smoldering (hackneyed as it may be, Rock Around the Clock was a highlight). But for all the portentousness of the photography and the long gazes, there was a certain amount of depth that was being signaled rather than embodied if that makes sense. It didn't help that the film's political perspective seemed sort of rote to me, and I don't think only because I've moved further left in recent years. We've seen the "Horrors of Life Behind the Iron Curtain" film ad nauseum for decades now, and I would have been much more curious to see a dialectic in play (the film hints at this with her restlessness in Paris, but seems to imply that it's a purely psychological tic), rather than the Wild Free West vs. the Gloomy Stalinist East the film simplistically conveys, romanticizing the starving artist bit by placing the emphasis on the latter.
ReplyDeleteHey Joel, good to hear from you. I think we're in about the same place here. The really hackneyed part is the romance of the Cold War itself on which it's most shallow (I like that "signaled rather than embodied"). But it sure looks good and sounds good in patches.
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