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| ‘Cold War’ Review: Love Without Borders | ‘Cold War’ Review: Love Without Borders |
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| “Cold War” is one of those love-among-the-ruins romances that turn suffering into high style. Like its two sexy leads — who fall for each other and keep on falling — the movie has been built for maximum seduction. It has just enough politics to give it heft, striking black-and-white images and an in-the-mood-for-love ambiguity that suggests great mysteries are in store for those who watch and wait. You won’t wait long. The movie runs just 89 minutes, during which swaths of the 20th century flutter by like a flipbook. | “Cold War” is one of those love-among-the-ruins romances that turn suffering into high style. Like its two sexy leads — who fall for each other and keep on falling — the movie has been built for maximum seduction. It has just enough politics to give it heft, striking black-and-white images and an in-the-mood-for-love ambiguity that suggests great mysteries are in store for those who watch and wait. You won’t wait long. The movie runs just 89 minutes, during which swaths of the 20th century flutter by like a flipbook. |
| It opens in Poland in 1949 with Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, a genius of slow-burning longing), a musician, touring the countryside gathering folk music. He and an attractively no-nonsense colleague, Irena (Agata Kulesza), record villagers whose plaintive, haunting music is a vestige of the rapidly receding past. (Their work brings to mind that of the American musicologist Alan Lomax, who made field recordings of folk musicians.) The writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski doesn’t tend to overshare, but the government toady riding with Wiktor and Irena telegraphs that the recordings have a less than innocent purpose. | It opens in Poland in 1949 with Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, a genius of slow-burning longing), a musician, touring the countryside gathering folk music. He and an attractively no-nonsense colleague, Irena (Agata Kulesza), record villagers whose plaintive, haunting music is a vestige of the rapidly receding past. (Their work brings to mind that of the American musicologist Alan Lomax, who made field recordings of folk musicians.) The writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski doesn’t tend to overshare, but the government toady riding with Wiktor and Irena telegraphs that the recordings have a less than innocent purpose. |
| [Our critics chose their favorite movies of 2018.] | [Our critics chose their favorite movies of 2018.] |
| That official emissary is Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), who with Wiktor and Irena facilitates the creation of a folk dance and music ensemble, Mazurek, housed in a dilapidated country villa. (The ensemble is based on a real Polish group, Mazowsze.) It’s at this villa that young dancers, singers and musicians are to dedicate themselves to the nation’s patrimony (“music, born in the fields”) in what Kaczmarek describes as “the fierce and noble struggle.” As Wiktor and Irena silently watch, conveying much through expressive silence, Kaczmarek tries to stir up the quiet crowd of applicants. “No more will the talents of the people go to waste — hurrah!” he announces, earning a weak cheer. | |
| The relative exoticism of the milieu and all the healthy young people who soon fill the ensemble generate more enthusiasm for the viewer, as does the arresting black-and-white imagery. Working within the pleasing, boxy confines of an old-school aspect ratio, Pawlikowski by turns isolates his characters or clutters his shots with bodies, creating a snapshot of collectivism. As in his previous movie, “Ida,” he likes to place characters in the lower half of the image, leaving a lot of acreage above their heads. (The television series “Mr. Robot” turned this kind of arrangement into a mannerist tic.) Here, the ample headroom at once draws your eye to the characters and makes them seem smaller in their world. | The relative exoticism of the milieu and all the healthy young people who soon fill the ensemble generate more enthusiasm for the viewer, as does the arresting black-and-white imagery. Working within the pleasing, boxy confines of an old-school aspect ratio, Pawlikowski by turns isolates his characters or clutters his shots with bodies, creating a snapshot of collectivism. As in his previous movie, “Ida,” he likes to place characters in the lower half of the image, leaving a lot of acreage above their heads. (The television series “Mr. Robot” turned this kind of arrangement into a mannerist tic.) Here, the ample headroom at once draws your eye to the characters and makes them seem smaller in their world. |
| The movie settles into its groove when Wiktor takes up with Zula (a terrifically vivid Joanna Kulig), a singer with a dramatic voice, pillowy lips and visceral ambition fueled by desperation. As she and Wiktor trade looks and steam up the screen, the ensemble comes into shape: Costumes are sewn and dances rehearsed in crisply edited, unfussy scenes. A banner reading “We Welcome Tomorrow” is strung across the school entrance, and the students — under Irena’s hawkish gaze, with Wiktor at the piano — are transformed into culture workers for the Polish People’s Republic. It suggests a fresh start for the students, for the country, and generates a palpable if cautious optimism. | The movie settles into its groove when Wiktor takes up with Zula (a terrifically vivid Joanna Kulig), a singer with a dramatic voice, pillowy lips and visceral ambition fueled by desperation. As she and Wiktor trade looks and steam up the screen, the ensemble comes into shape: Costumes are sewn and dances rehearsed in crisply edited, unfussy scenes. A banner reading “We Welcome Tomorrow” is strung across the school entrance, and the students — under Irena’s hawkish gaze, with Wiktor at the piano — are transformed into culture workers for the Polish People’s Republic. It suggests a fresh start for the students, for the country, and generates a palpable if cautious optimism. |
| That doesn’t last. A blandly villainous emissary from the government descends, forcing the ensemble to adapt Soviet-style socialist realism. As a representative of the new nation, the group now should have a repertoire that addresses, he explains, “land reform, world peace and threats to it,” an edict that pushes art into the service of propaganda. Pawlikowski doesn’t pad his movie with dialogue, but instead distills this new world order in a few sentences and the image of Irena’s fading smile. When the apparatchik calls for “a strong number about the leader of the world proletariat,” it sounds like a bad joke (or a movie executive note), but it chills the room. It also slowly undoes Wiktor and Zula. | That doesn’t last. A blandly villainous emissary from the government descends, forcing the ensemble to adapt Soviet-style socialist realism. As a representative of the new nation, the group now should have a repertoire that addresses, he explains, “land reform, world peace and threats to it,” an edict that pushes art into the service of propaganda. Pawlikowski doesn’t pad his movie with dialogue, but instead distills this new world order in a few sentences and the image of Irena’s fading smile. When the apparatchik calls for “a strong number about the leader of the world proletariat,” it sounds like a bad joke (or a movie executive note), but it chills the room. It also slowly undoes Wiktor and Zula. |
| Pawlikowski packs a lot into “Cold War,” often elliptically. Wiktor and Zula soon separate and settle in different countries only to reunite and separate once more. Throughout, their longing for each other — as well as the music they make, together and apart — expresses searching ideas about art and authenticity, national identity and cultural nostalgia. Crucially, when Irena defends the ensemble, saying that its work is based on “authentic folk art,” Wiktor keeps silent. What they’re doing has little relationship to their field recordings, but like the urban audiences raptly watching these folk pastiches — emblems of a vanishing Poland — Irena is clinging to an identity that is nearly lost. | Pawlikowski packs a lot into “Cold War,” often elliptically. Wiktor and Zula soon separate and settle in different countries only to reunite and separate once more. Throughout, their longing for each other — as well as the music they make, together and apart — expresses searching ideas about art and authenticity, national identity and cultural nostalgia. Crucially, when Irena defends the ensemble, saying that its work is based on “authentic folk art,” Wiktor keeps silent. What they’re doing has little relationship to their field recordings, but like the urban audiences raptly watching these folk pastiches — emblems of a vanishing Poland — Irena is clinging to an identity that is nearly lost. |
| That loss permeates “Cold War” as the decades pass and the scenery changes. Wiktor ends up in Paris, where he plays piano in a jazz club. (Soviet-influenced Poland declared jazz bourgeois, degenerate junk, driving it underground.) In France, Wiktor embraces a caricature of bohemian life, living in a garret that is only somewhat less fanciful than the one that Gene Kelly inhabits in “An American in Paris.” Wiktor is a Polish expat playing African-American music in Paris, pursuing an illusion of freedom as Zula — whom he calls the woman of his life — performs communist kitsch and gradually falls to pieces. (Poor Irena departs the movie after the social realist hammer comes down.) | That loss permeates “Cold War” as the decades pass and the scenery changes. Wiktor ends up in Paris, where he plays piano in a jazz club. (Soviet-influenced Poland declared jazz bourgeois, degenerate junk, driving it underground.) In France, Wiktor embraces a caricature of bohemian life, living in a garret that is only somewhat less fanciful than the one that Gene Kelly inhabits in “An American in Paris.” Wiktor is a Polish expat playing African-American music in Paris, pursuing an illusion of freedom as Zula — whom he calls the woman of his life — performs communist kitsch and gradually falls to pieces. (Poor Irena departs the movie after the social realist hammer comes down.) |
| Pawlikowski has ideas he wants you to chew over, but at times his narrative brevity can make the story feel as if it’s stopping before it has really begun. If you want more, it’s because the worlds he opens up and his two impossible, irresistible lovers are so beguiling that you would like to linger longer, learn more, see more. The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak. | Pawlikowski has ideas he wants you to chew over, but at times his narrative brevity can make the story feel as if it’s stopping before it has really begun. If you want more, it’s because the worlds he opens up and his two impossible, irresistible lovers are so beguiling that you would like to linger longer, learn more, see more. The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak. |