Blue Romance
COLD WAR Pawel Pawlikowski returns with an exquisite and elliptical love affair…
I’ve always been interested in these love stories that are a fight to the death, two equally strong people who love each other but fight dirty,” says Pawel Pawlikowski, speaking to Teasers over breakfast at London’s Hoxton Hotel about his new film, the award-winning Soviet-era melodrama Cold War.
Pawlikowski’s first movie since 2013’s Oscar-winning Ida, this paredback tale explores a troubled post-war relationship between pianist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and singer Zula (Joanna Kulig). Spanning from late 1940s Communist-run Poland to early 1960s free-wheeling Paris, the film’s star-crossed lovers are incapable of living with or without each other.
The Polish-born Pawlikowski, who began his feature film career in England with Last Resort and My Summer Of Love, was inspired by his own parents, who endured a tumultuous relationship. “My father was the major culprit because he was a womaniser,” he explains. “When [my mother] discovered what he was up to, she gave as good as she got.”
While his mother and father divorced, going on to hook up with others, they eventually reunited. “You have these other partners. Maybe infatuations [but] then you realise they never understand you as well as this other person, with whom you have a shared past together. You know where they come from; a common experience.”
Winning Best Director when it bowed in Cannes this year, Cold War took Pawlikowski seven months to shoot, with deliberate gaps in the schedule allowing him to sculpt and re-write scenes. “With each film, I insist at the beginning on these gaps,” he says, noting this method is similar to his approach making documentaries at the outset of his career.
He also spent months researching the film’s music, attending Polish folk festivals on the lookout for “faces and performers” to flesh out the period detail. While his leading man took piano lessons, Kulig had trained as a singer (and even played one in Ida). It was crucial they got it right. “The music was the glue from the beginning,” he says.
Already out in his homeland,
Cold War has been a huge box-office hit there. “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” he says. “It’s not political, but it hit a deep nerve, with the music, and this story of exile and a fucked-up life. The reviews were incredibly positive – from the right, worryingly, to the left. People are very moved by it.”
It marks another artistic triumph following the director’s return to Poland, though Pawlikowski has no interest in making a third black-andwhite movie. Instead, he’s hoping to make a doc about the Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. “He’s an extraordinary individual,” says the director, himself an avid Arsenal fan. Who knows – there might even be as many fireworks as there are in Cold War.
ETA | 31 AUGUST / COLD WAR OPENS NEXT MONTH.