San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A ‘Cold War’ tale of politics and passion
Growing up in Warsaw, Pawel Pawlikowski remembers his parents’ relationship as “a 40-year-long complicated, fascinating, never-ending disaster of a love affair.” It presented him with all sorts of questions as a boy about the capricious nature of love and marriage, yet the 61-yearold Polish filmmaker admits his mother and father’s starcrossed romance has proved to be an artistic goldmine.
“They were so incredibly mismatched as a couple, but they were also the most dramatically interesting characters I’ve ever known,” Pawlikowski said during a recent interview in San Francisco about his new movie, “Cold War.” He said he’s wanted to make a film about them “for at least 10 years.”
His new heartrending, opposites-attract romance, “Cold War,” which earned Pawlikowski the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival and is Poland’s entry into this year’s Oscar race for best foreign film, is based on Pawlikowski’s parents’ exceptional and exceptionally tumultuous “disrupted love,” he said.
“Cold War” is set during the dreary early decades of the actual Cold War in Poland, as well as Germany, Yugoslavia and France. The movie is suffused with music (Polish folk music and then, later, big band and jazz, which had been banned by
“Cold War”
(PG-13) opens Friday, Jan. 18, at Bay Area theaters.
Stalin) that Pawlikowski calls “the glue that holds the story together.”
He shot it in black and white not, as one would assume, for aesthetic reasons (“I don’t consider myself a stylist,” he said) but because “everything felt gray back then . I couldn’t imagine the colors of (communist) Poland other than nondescript grayish browns, the washed-out shades of cities in ruins and people in nondescript, drab clothing,” Pawlikowski said. “So black and white felt like the best solution.”
He cast the striking Polish actors Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot as tempestuous lovers Zula and Wiktor, named after Pawlikowski’s own parents. Kulig played supporting roles in Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning 2015 film “Ida” and his 2001 film, “The Woman in the Fifth” with Ethan Hawke, yet her captivating, breakout performance in “Cold War” has struck a chord with audiences and critics worldwide.
“Cold War” opens in 1949 when Wiktor, as director of a Polish government-sponsored folk dance and music ensemble (tasked with “singing praise to the Fatherland”) meets young Zula, a sultry and mischievous young singer who has run away from an abusive father to audition for the troupe.
Wiktor and Zula’s flirtation quickly becomes more serious, and the film charts the push-pull nature of their bond over 14 years as they move in and out of each other’s lives and back and forth across the Iron Curtain.
In real life, Pawlikowski said his parents’ relationship was, remarkably, an even more melodramatic and prolonged “adventure that played out over decades and lasted the duration of the Cold War.”
“My mother was a ballerina when she ran away from home at 17 and met my father on holiday. He was a student of medicine at the time and 10 years older.”
Just as in “Cold War,” the Pawlikowskis couldn’t live peacefully with, or without, one another. They split up numerous times before having Pawel. Later, they divorced and reunited more than once. “They’d meet up, get together again, and then quarrel and split up again. And again. But after 40 years of to-ing and fro-ing they found peace with one another,” Pawlikowski said. “Too tired to fight, they died peacefully together, in 1989 — ironically, just before the Berlin Wall came down. So there was always something epic about their whole thing to me.”
Pawlikowski has brought
the epic scale of Europe’s postwar geopolitical tumult to bear on a story that also exhibits an intimate understanding of its protagonists and their temperamental differences.
Pawlikowski agreed that one of the questions “Cold War” inspires us to ponder is if we are somehow different, and if we love differently, when we are in different places and cultures.
“How do you stay yourself during a life in exile?” he said. “We all start out thinking love is something absolute, but then realize people keep changing, in themselves and because of their environment. What my parents had in the end was this feeling that OK, the world out there continues to change, but no one knows me better than you, so what’s outside isn’t of consequence.”
“It’s a powerful idea,” Pawlikowski said, one he had been toying with fleshing out in a screenplay for more than a decade. He only felt confident and ready after his success with “Ida.” The global hit about a young novitiate nun who discovers she is Jewish before her final vows was Pawlikowski’s first film set in Poland.
He lived for many years in England, where he first moved with his mother at age 14, and moved back to Warsaw in 2013.
The elegant cinematography in “Cold War,” its beautifully framed shots of characters set against vast black-andwhite landscapes, can seem nostalgic, rather than focused on the horrors of living under communism. “But it’s not nostalgia for Stalinism, but for a time with less stuff, an analog time,” Pawlikowski said when he introduced “Cold War” at the Telluride Film Festival.
Also, he said, the 21st century befuddles him. “I can’t make dramatic sense of today, so I look further back.”
Jessica Zack is a Bay Area freelance writer.