‘Cold War’ / ‘Zimna Vojna’ Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
Cannes ’18 Review by Peter Belsito
The opening of Pawel Pawlikowski’s terrific, smoky-cool love story ‘Cold War’ gives you no clue to what lies ahead: Chickens. Snow. A country fiddler in a tattered tweed coat. Later, more chickens. Mud.
But this picture moves, like a silvery ghost, from the Polish countryside in 1949, to Warsaw and Berlin, to the nightclubs of Paris.
Partners in work and possibly in life as well, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, dashing and magnetic, like a Polish Clive Owen) and Irena (Agata Kulesza, who starred as the young novitiate Wanda in Ida) are traveling the postwar Polish countryside, making recordings of regional singers and musicians. They’re putting together a troupe that will highlight the nation’s finest folk-art performers — when assembled, it will be a group of robust young men and women decked out in traditional Polish dress and performing peasant dances and sweet songs about embroidering shirts for their loved ones
A pouty blonde, Joanna Kulig’s Zula, shows up for one of the mass tryouts — with her appraising eyes and obvious city-mouse aspirations, she’s an Eastern Bloc femme fatale. Irena picks up immediately on Zula’s perfumey vibes and tries to warn her partner. Too late. He’s a goner from the start, a gorgeous lug who’s ready for love.
Wiktor, unlike Irena, caves immediately when Polish officials give their stamp of approval to the musical purity of the troupe — they just want a few changes made. Can’t the group do more songs about, say, agricultural reform? Before long, the ensemble is singing hymns of praise to Stalin.
By this time, Irena has had the good sense to clear out, and Wiktor and Zula are tightly entwined in their flower crown of love.
Tn the next thing you know, he’s hunched over a piano in the black-pearl interior of a Paris nightclub, coaxing lovesick chords from the instrument’s depths.
That’s not the end of the story. It’s hardly even the beginning. Cold War is a crisply controlled saga of romantic torture, glamour, forbidden border crossings and more betrayals than you can shake a black silk stocking at.
This is a movie about treacherous love in tough times. Pawlikowski keeps a tight rein on the story’s tone and mood, and perhaps it’s by design that you don’t really see the love between Zula and Wiktor develop: It springs fully formed, like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. It’s that fierce and heartless. But this duo’s ardor burns clean and cool, like a Sobranie, and Kulig is the flint.
At one point Zula, having escaped her former country-mouse existence and exchanged it for nightclub sophistication, coos into a microphone as if it were an extension of her semi-ruthless soul. But in the end, like poor Wiktor, she’s a fool for love. They’re citizens of a nation they’ve invented themselves, a place where the only way to keep the peace is to set the whole place ablaze.
The cold war at the center of this restless, ellipsis-filled film is one between hearts, not territories.
Skipping across European borders and a 15-year timeframe, Pawlikowski sketches an intense long-term love affair between two mismatched Polish musicians.
Loosely inspired by the tempestuous marriage of the director’s late parents — for whom the principals are named, and to whom the film is mournfully dedicated and is informed by the broken jazz rhythms beloved of its protagonist.
It takes some time, in fact, for the film to reveal itself as a tragic love story at all, as its opening reels promise more of a folk patchwork — in multiple ways, as we open directly on a village band’s strident, ragged rendition of a plaintive traditional song. “Open up, my love, for fear of God,” they warble, anticipating unrelated romantic desperation to come.
The year is 1949, and the performance, delivered bluntly to camera in cramped Academy ratio (another visual carry-over from Pawlikowski’s last film), turns out to be for the benefit of Wiktor (Kot) and Irena (Agata Kulesza, wonderfully salty), jaded musical directors talent-scouting for a theatrical folk ensemble.
Based on the real-life Mazowske troupe, founded in the wake of World War II and still performing today, the intent behind the act is to celebrate regional culture, packaging and polishing rural talent for international stages.
Wiktor, however, is less interested in championing indigenous artistry than in finding a star. He’s an urbane pianist with a passion for jazz, his eyes light up when electric blonde chanteuse Zula (Kulig) enters the audition room. She’s plainly not the backwater ingenue she claims to be, and seems about as authentic singing folk music as Britney doing bluegrass, but her talent and charisma are undeniable; within two years, she’s lighting up the ensemble to packed houses across Europe, and having a torrid if not fully candid affair with Wiktor. When the troupe’s career-minded manager Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc) effectively sells out to the Soviets, retooling the show as a Stalinist propaganda act, Wiktor bails, while the more ideologically complacent Zula stays on.
That’s merely the first boy-loses-girl stage in a love story that drifts across the Continent as loosely and erratically as the characters drift through their own lives, buffeted alternately by political circumstance and personal impetuosity. The narrative chronology may be linear, often leaping across several years in a single cut, but as Wiktor and Zula reunite and separate multiple times over the course of a decade, time effectively seems to stall and loop: Lost both with and without each other, neither one seems able to progress with their relationship in perennial, cyclical limbo.
Wiktor, winding up a bedraggled jazzman at a Paris nightclub, listens to Louis Jordan’s “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t Baby,” and it’s the rare case of an on-the-nose song choice speaking perfectly for a character. As long as the question remains unanswered, the cold war between the two persists; any détente can only be bittersweet.
If it’s initially difficult to invest emotionally in Wiktor and Zula’s relationship, that’s because they have similar trouble themselves — it’s as we see how difficult it is for these two artists to give themselves to each other that we begin to ache for them. (“Believe in yourself,” he implores her. “I do — it’s you I don’t believe in,” comes the pithy, telling reply.) If Kot is the film’s elegant, temperate anchor, Kulig is its wildly swinging pendulum: Wholly riveting to watch, she rifles through moods and attitudes with the casual magnetism of a young Jeanne Moreau, or even a Euro Jennifer Lawrence. In one extraordinary, fast-whirling centerpiece, she furiously dances out her frustrations to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” — another pointed, biting soundtrack cue, its nascent rock ’n’ roll beat pointing to a future in which Wiktor’s jazz sensibility may not survive.
Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
With: Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, Agata Kulesza, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar. (Polish, French dialogue)
1 hour 28 minutes
Running time: 88 MIN. (Original title: “Zimna wojna”)
PRODUCTION: (Poland-U.K.-France) An Amazon Studios (in U.S.) release of an Opus Film, Polish Film Institute, MK2 Films, Film4, British Film Institute presentation of an Opus Film, Apocalypso Pictures, MK Prods. production in association with Protagonist Pictures. (International sales: Protagonist Pictures, London; MK2 Films, Paris.) Producers: Tanya Seghatchian, Ewa Puszczyńska. Executive producers: Nathanaël Karmitz, Lizzie Francke, Rohit Khattar, John Woodward, Jeremy Gawade, Daniel Battsek. Co-producers: Piotr Dzięcioł, Małgorzata Bela.
CREW: Director: Pawel Pawlikowski. Screenplay: Pawlikowski, Janusz Glowacki, with the collaboration of Piotr Borkowski. Camera (B&W): Łukasz Żal. Editor: Jarosław Kamiński.
WITH: Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, Agata Kulesza, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar. (Polish, French dialogue)
ISA: MK2 and Protagonist licensed to Benelux (Cineart), Ex-Yugoslavia, Albania (MCF Megaom) France (Diaphana), Hungary (Mozinet), Israel (Lev Cinemas/ Shani), Italy (Lucky Red), Mexico (Canibal Networks), Portugal (Midas), Switzerland (Filmcoopi), U.K. (Curzon Artificial Eye)
