Beautiful tale of lovers at the fates’ mercy
Cannes Film Festival Cold War Cert TBC, 85 min Dir Paweł Pawlikowski Starring Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Agata Kulesza, Borys Szyc, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar
Pawel Pawlikowski’s intensely personal new film is very much a companion piece to Ida, which won him the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2015. It’s shot again in silvery blackand-white, and roughly spans the years between the Second World War and that film. The gravitational pull of Poland, both for the director and the two characters whose love story he is telling, has a siren’s irresistibility, like some anguished folk refrain.
Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny. The main characters, Wiktor (Kot) and Zula (Kulig), are a pianist and young singer from peasant stock, whose careers send them bounding restlessly across Europe, in and out of each other’s lives, during these decades of unrest.
They first meet in 1949, when Wiktor and colleagues are holding auditions for a choral troupe that Zula joins, raising the standard with her originality, as the soon-to-be-smitten Wiktor puts it. Their performances cause a stir in Warsaw, but the attention of the authorities isn’t desirable: before they know it, the chorus is being told to move away from folk and towards ballads about agricultural reform. One step later, they’re singing under huge, idealised posters of Stalin. Wiktor’s sinister business partner (Szyc) summons disturbing echoes of the recent past, meanwhile, with his concern that all the women singing should have a “pure Slav look” (read: not Jewish).
It becomes clear that they need to get out soon. Zula is on her way to becoming a star – a blonde, boozing good-time girl, after she and Wiktor have separately found ways to slip the Iron Curtain. They are in love, though live just as often apart as together. Their relationship is obviously to be understood as its own kind of cold war, a precarious treaty based on suspicion and need, with a mysterious death wish bubbling under it.
Kulig, as effervescent as the young Jeanne Moreau, is the film’s life force. Kot, perhaps, is a harder actor to care about, but his stony remove gives the film contrast, and there are great, prickly scenes built around him.
Somehow, the film is both pristine and jazzy – emotionally aloof by design, but still accessible. The eerie intensity of Ida isn’t quite there to grab us by the throat, but Pawlikowski supplies a related melancholy, about the pain of not knowing what you’re looking for.