A beguiling tale of love across the Iron Curtain
★★★★☆ Dir Paweł Pawlikowski Starring Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Agata Kulesza, Borys Szyc, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar
From the age of 14, Paweł Pawlikowski found himself in exile from Poland’s Communist rule with his mother, a ballet dancer. Until Ida, which won him the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2015, he mainly worked in the UK rather than his native country. Ida has been life-changing for him, and career-changing: he has moved back to Warsaw and switched artistic focus completely.
Pawlikowski’s even more personal new film, Cold War, is very much a companion piece to Ida, shot again in silvery black-and-white, and roughly spanning the years between the Second World War and that film. The gravitational pull of Poland, both for the director and the two main characters, has a siren’s irresistibility.
Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its jumps in time and location, its very destiny. The first things we see are a set of Polish bagpipes and a fiddle being played by street musicians.
Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) are a rangy pianist and a young singer from peasant stock, whose careers send them 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, which 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 necessarily desirable: before they know it, the chorus is being told to move away from classic folk repertoire and towards ballads about agricultural reform.
One step later, they’re singing under huge posters of Stalin, while Wiktor’s sinister business partner (Borys Szyc) summons troubling echoes of the recent past, with his concern that the female singers should have a “pure Slav look” (read: not Jewish).
It becomes clear that they need to get out, and soon. Zula is on her way to becoming a solo star, after she and Wiktor have separately found ways to slip the Iron Curtain. They are in love, but live just as often apart as together, in different cities for years at a time, or in haphazard affairs with other people.
Rude trumpet blasts over a fade to black herald the shift to Western Europe in 1954, as we find ourselves inside a Parisian jazz club where Wiktor sessions. He becomes a film composer, too, for a philandering director played by Cédric Kahn. The couple bicker about Zula’s career, but it’s out of jealousy, because she suspects Wiktor’s involvement with a poet (Jeanne Balibar) whose lyrics he’s setting to music for her. They can’t live with or without each other – their relationship is obviously to be understood as its own kind of cold war.
Kulig is the film’s life force, an alcoholic hellcat who thrusts herself into the embraces of other men. Kot is harder to care about, but his stony remove lends contrast. Somehow, the film is both pristine and jazzy – emotionally aloof but still accessible.
As these two criss-cross each other, the very nostalgia that put them on the map redoubles its claim on them, luring them back together. So why do they seem more lonely than ever?