Cold War

Nation­al­ism, or the ques­tion of how and why we love our coun­try, 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 love anoth­er human? This ques­tion is posed, albeit oblique­ly, in Pawel Pawlikowski’s immac­u­late­ly craft­ed and high­ly per­son­al sixth fic­tion fea­ture, his fol­low-up to 2013’s mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful med­i­ta­tion on iden­ti­ty and the lega­cy of the Holo­caust, Ida.

As with that film, Cold War is pho­tographed in smoky mono­chrome shades and with­in the sti­fling, boxy con­fines of the 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 East­ern 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 songs which offered those on the mar­gins the small­est scin­til­la of hope dur­ing times of con­flict. The plan is then to refine and stylise the music by trans­form­ing it into a pub­lic dis­play of nation­al pride. It is while for­mu­lat­ing the show that he meets the enig­mat­ic ice blonde Zula (Joan­na Kulig) – arrest­ed but not con­vict­ed for killing her father.

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 work to build a roman­tic image of the suf­fer­ing mass­es. The pair make a plan to flee togeth­er and this is when the clever crux of Pawlikowski’s emo­tion­al­ly tumul­tuous dra­ma is revealed.

Where Ida’s small-scale sto­ry had far-reach­ing rami cations, here the nar­ra­tive feels much grander as the char­ac­ters hop between coun­tries in an attempt to find a place where their love feels nat­ur­al. Yet the lm’s curt­ness (it runs at an extreme­ly swift 84 min­utes) and the lib­er­al use of ellipses between scenes (which expect the view­er to fill in a lot of blanks) serve to stymie the over­all impact of a yearn­ing romance which feels dis­placed from the clas­si­cal Hol­ly­wood era. This is one of those very rare cas­es where it would have been nice to see some more colour and tex­ture. It is also frus­trat­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to get a sense of time pass­ing, of things hav­ing hap­pened, of events tak­ing their toll on the psy­che of the char­ac­ters. Phys­i­cal­ly, nei­ther lead seems to age across the film’s two-decade-plus timeframe.

That said, on a moment-by-moment basis, Cold War is often breath­tak­ing, and Paw­likows­ki has clear­ly laboured over each and every shot to finesse cam­era move­ment, tim­ing, chore­og­ra­phy and shot length. A sequence in which Zula, hav­ing joined Wik­tor in Paris, starts to dance to ​‘Rock Around the Clock’ in a night­club, explodes with ener­gy and pas­sion. It push­es the director’s sub­tle the­sis on the insid­i­ous­ly allur­ing nature of West­ern cul­ture and cap­i­tal­ism, 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.