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Cold War
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Musician Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) meets and falls in love
with a fiery and talented singer, Zula (Joanna Kulig), at an official Polish
folk music school in 1949. When, on tour, Wiktor grabs his chance to defect to
West Germany, Zula does not join him. By the early 1960s, their tangled
relationship has crossed several other countries including Yugoslavia, as well
as France during its jazz era.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s follow-up to Ida (2013), again set partly in his native Poland, is a tale of
love – indeed, of amour fou – set
against the changing tides of communist and capitalist societies. Like the
films of Jia Zhang-ke (Ash is Purest White,
2018), Cold War compares evolving
fashions in musical performance (folk, jazz, pop) with the machinations of
opposed ideologies.
The “cold war” indicated by the title is not only a
historical epoch, but also a state of perpetual, sombre non-alignment between
Zula and Wiktor (intensely played by the principals): they are rarely truly
unified in their desires, values, life situations and political affiliations. And
yet, an unquenchable, destructive passion keeps hurling them together. In this
“crazy love” vein, the film is close to, say, Fatih Akin’s Head-On (2004), and it strikes the same, basic cluster of
form-and-content-and-sensibility chords.
Cinematographer Łukasz Żal sets a finely
chiselled, black-and-white style that aims to subliminally affect us through
the vast “head room” left above the actors in virtually every scene, sometimes
every shot. There is something a little too calculated about this, and indeed
about everything in Cold War – from
its mise en scène moves and
glamorously gloomy romanticism, to its resolutely well-targeted arthouse market
pitch.
It’s a “popular art movie” that feels made to flatter
and please its audiences. I resisted the pitch, but was still
inexorably pulled in, intermittently at least, by the moody, fatalistic vibe.
MORE Pawlikowski: My Summer of Love © Adrian Martin September 2018 |
