LIMINAL LOVE
Romance set in height of the Cold War rivals Netflix’s Spanish-language Roma
As a child who came of age in the ’80s, I think of the Cold War as something that was over almost before I understood it was happening. But if you were young and in love just after the Second World War, the years from 1947 to 1991 were a lifetime.
This is the geopolitical setting for the romantic tragedy at the heart of Cold War, a love letter to an era but more directly to Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s parents, who share first names with the star-crossed lovers at the centre of the tale.
They are Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), who meet at a new ly formed arts school in Poland in 1949. (The star they have crossed is the one
on the Soviet flag.) The Communists are eager to preserve the music and dance of the newest corner of their empire, though they soon start asking the performers if maybe they could do a number about agricultural reform, or Stalin.
The two fall hard for one another, but their lives take very different paths when he defects during a concert in East Berlin in ’52, and she gets cold feet. The rest of the episodic film finds them meeting up intermittently over the years in Paris, Yugoslavia and elsewhere, but always with other people and never able to connect, except in brief, passionate moments.
Pawlikowski’s film is shot in black and white, in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio — picture a Cold War-era TV set. And befitting the lives of its protagonists, it is shot through with music, including a keening folk number that serves as the anthem of their lives. It won the best director prize at Cannes last May and, unusual for a foreign-language film, is up for five British academy awards, including cinematography, direction, screenplay and art direction. (Unusual but not unique — Alfonso Cuarón’s Spanish-language Roma is competing in all the same categories.)
The movie deftly weaves together the personal and the political. Sitting on a park bench, a line like, “Let’s go to the other side; the view will be better there,” can be read in very different ways.
But growing up in a Communist regime, Zula and Wiktor get so used to talking in circles that they never get things straight. In one early scene, she confesses that she’s been ratting on him to a local official; such things were of course expected of everyone. Much later, he is arrested for an illegal border crossing and tells her: “It turns out I spied for the British.” It’s one of several scenes that flirts with farce and would be funny if it weren’t already so heartbreaking.