The opening of COLD WAR is a delight for music lovers. Intriguing snippets of unfamiliar airs and the loving detail of unique instruments begins the soundtrack to 15 years in the lives of a pair of lovers. Paweł Pawlikowski’s follow-up to the Academy Award-winning IDA, won the Best Director prize at Cannes this year and it is a masterful film when the beauty of the images offsets the ugliness of a post-WWII Europe and the impossible love story is desperately willed by an entranced audience.
Max and his team are collecting “peasant style” music in rural Poland in 1949 to create a folk troupe purposed with a rekindling of Soviet pride and with an eye to performing for other “brotherly nations”. As part of the audition process, they meet Zula. Her easy manipulation of a fellow auditionee, and the panel, imply she is a girl with secrets. Her beauty and a good voice catches the eye of Wiktor, according to him she has “energy, spirit”. They will become lovers and the story of their coming together and the geopolitical forces which separate, yet serve them, is at the heart of COLD WAR.
For over a decade Pawlikowski had searched for a way to honour his parents, Wiktor and Zula, who had spent 40 years together, apart, punishing each other on both sides of the Iron Curtain. ‘They were both strong, wonderful people, but as a couple a never-ending disaster,’ Pawlikowski reflects. Ultimately he has made a film which is not about his parents but definitely of the times in which they lived.
Joanna Kulig as Zara is luminous. Not styled to be beautiful, the unkempt girl desperate to escape her circumstances may be made over but she is never idealised, it is a radiance of performance and interior monologue which lights up each frame. Never above a dramatic gesture or vivid response, Kulig is nevertheless interior. The complexity of expression on her seeming impassive face relying, heartbreakingly often, on Wiktor to interpret for us.
His is the outwardly broken heart of the piece. With virtuosic piano playing and a soulful expression Tomasz Kot carries the hurts of the past much closer to the surface as Wiktor’s professional achievements bring him little pleasure. Kot endows the musician, conductor, lover, with yearning and desire as the pulsing motivation of every career and personal choice. And they are beautiful together. Delicately and elegantly entwined, she tiny against his tall frame, they are shot with a power and charismatic empathy.
There are many gaps in their lives over the 15 years, only seven meetings are revealed by the film and those at the mercy of a political climate which sets countrymen and women against each other. The Cold War elements are focused in the character of Max . Ambitious and placating he is happy for the troupe to be subverted for communist ideology and Stalin worship. It will stand him in good stead and as played by Borys Szyc he is oleaginous and unapologetic.
The music continues to flow through the film, as conflicted as the love story. From peasant fiddle and bagpipe to Rock Around the Clock, it is beautifully realised and the jazz is thrilling, even if too brief. Visually, the film is just as exciting despite a famous utilitarianism in the shot selection of the near-square Academy format which Pawlikowski also used for IDA. Shot in black and white, not as any style making choice but rooted in story and period there are deep velvet shadows and a sepia cast to the white, like dirty snow. Pawlikowski has said that he intended to use colour but felt the decay and damage of the Polish countryside of the period was better articulated without it.
COLD WAR is invested with still images, relying on the cast for the emotional impact, and dolly and track to put them in context or follow their journey. As with the missing years there are beats and events half seen. The beginning of the no of a head shake, a half implied fall. Reflections in glass and mirror.
The film is visually stunning but COLD WAR is a film to savour for the depth of creation of its story and setting. Tempestuous and lyrical, unbearably romantic and sweetly sad, with a despairing inevitability it is one of the films of the year.
COLD WAR releases in Palace Cinemas around Australia on December 26. You can see the breathtakingly beautiful trailer here.
