Cold War – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Cold War – first look review

11 May 2018

Words by David Jenkins

A pensive woman with a serious expression gazes through a window, with another figure visible in the background.
A pensive woman with a serious expression gazes through a window, with another figure visible in the background.
This minia­ture mono­chrome epic from Pawel Paw­likows­ki is a extra­or­di­nary piece of cin­e­mat­ic craftsmanship.

Nation­al­ism, or the ques­tion of how and why we love the coun­try we call home, feels extreme­ly apro­pos in a polit­i­cal moment dom­i­nat­ed by dem­a­gogues and loon­bags. Fur­ther­more, do we love a coun­try with the same fer­vour, the same illog­i­cal impulse, the same sense of ten­der­ness and long­ing, that we might do anoth­er human? This ques­tion is posed, albeit oblique­ly, in Pawel Pawlikowski’s immac­u­late­ly craft­ed and abra­sive­ly per­son­al sixth fic­tion fea­ture, which is his fol­low-up to the mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful 2013 med­i­ta­tion on the lega­cy of the Holo­caust, Ida.

As with that film, Cold War is pho­tographed in smokey mono­chrome shades and with­in the sti­fling, boxy con­fines of the 1:1 Acad­e­my ratio. The black and white serves the film per­fect­ly as a visu­al short­hand, as it is a sto­ry which strad­dles the bina­ry divide of east and west­ern Europe in the years direct­ly fol­low­ing World War Two.

Wik­tor (Tomasz Kot) is a Pol­ish musi­col­o­gist on a mis­sion to pre­serve the folk tra­di­tions which offered those on the mar­gins the small­est scin­til­la of hope dur­ing the mis­ery of con­flict. The plan is then to refine and stylise the col­lect­ed music by trans­form­ing it into a pub­lic dis­play of nation­al cel­e­bra­tion. It is while for­mu­lat­ing the show that Wik­tor meets the enig­mat­ic ice blonde Zula (Joan­na Kulig) – arrest­ed but not con­vict­ed for killing her father, and in pos­ses­sion of a voice which could take her far.

As Wik­tor falls in love with Zula, he falls out of love with Poland, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the Stal­in­ist pro­pa­gan­da machine is look­ing to co-opt his project to build a roman­tic, pride­ful image of the suf­fer­ing mass­es. The pair hatch a plan to flee togeth­er while on tour in Berlin, and this is when the clever crux of Pawlikowski’s emo­tion­al­ly tumul­tuous dra­ma is revealed.

Where Ida told a small scale sto­ry with far-reach­ing ram­i­fi­ca­tions, the sto­ry here is much grander in its ambi­tions as the char­ac­ters hop between coun­tries and between polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies in an attempt to find a place where their love is served by the nat­ur­al sur­round­ings. Yet the film’s des­per­ate curt­ness (it runs at an extreme­ly swift 84 min­utes) and the lib­er­al use of ellipses between scenes (in which view­ers are expect­ed to fill in many impor­tant blanks) serve to stymie the over­all impact of this yearn­ing, era-span­ning romance which feels like its been dis­placed from the clas­si­cal Hol­ly­wood era.

This is, in fact, one of those very rare cas­es where it would’ve been nice to see some more colour and tex­ture, some more of the moments that we’ve been pushed to con­coct in our own heads. Where the film falls is that it’s dif­fi­cult to get a sense of time pass­ing, of things hav­ing hap­pened, of events tak­ing their toll on the psy­che of the char­ac­ters, of being able to see why emo­tions have devel­oped in cer­tain ways. Phys­i­cal­ly, nei­ther lead seems to age across the film’s 20 year-plus time­frame, so it’s a tough task of keep­ing track of when and where we are.

That said, on a moment-by-moment basis, it’s an often breath­tak­ing work, and Paw­likows­ki has clear­ly laboured over each and every shot to finesse cam­era move­ment, fram­ing, chore­og­ra­phy and shot length. A sequence in which Zula, hav­ing joined Wik­tor in Paris, begins to shim­my to Rock Around the Clock in a crowd­ed night­club, explodes with ener­gy and pas­sion. It push­es the director’s sub­tle the­sis on the insid­i­ous­ly allur­ing nature of cap­i­tal­ist cul­ture, and it’s per­haps the film’s most mov­ing moment, even though the inten­tion might not be there. These amaz­ing moments aside, it’s hard not to think that this film need­ed a lit­tle less cold and a lit­tle more war.

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