Cold War

Cold War (2018)

Dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

Written by Paweł Pawlikowski Janusz Głowacki Piotr Borkowski

Starring Tomasz Kot, Joanna Kulig

For a Polish artist born in the 1950s and exiled from his communist homeland at the age of 14, what title could be more auspicious than COLD WAR? Any artist could spend a lifetime examining the topic and never get to the bottom of it. But Paweł Pawlikowski (IDA) is most surely not just any artist, and he aims to do it in a slim 88 minutes, fully an hour less than just part I of AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. He does this by finding the vast within the intimate, focusing not on the corridors of power or the abstraction of politics, but on a brilliantly elliptical, intensely focused portrait of the ebb and flow of the relationship between musician Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and singer Zula (Joanna Kulig), as they navigate both the geopolitical turmoil around them and long-simmering emotional turmoil between them. 

Pawlikowski does not idealize their relationship; if there is a certain undeniable chemistry between them, it’s not expressed in tranquil compatibility, and they’re absolutely never happy together. But the possibility of happiness feels remote to the point of indifferent abstraction here. Their decades-long fractured courtship emerges not as something desirable, but as something primal, inexorable, fundamental and grounding in a world of titanic and impersonal forces constantly shifting and destabilizing the puny mortals gripping onto it for dear life. And it is this instinctual immediacy which grounds their story, which is told not so much as a narrative as it is a quick succession of laconic moments in time, reducing years and decades into crisp, mysterious vignettes that reveal the story’s center in the orbits its gravity produces on our unhappy couple.

It’s a compellingly understated love story --if it can even be called a love story, “a hopeless self-destructive desperation story” having a somewhat less iconic ring to it-- anchored by two outstanding performances from the two protagonists, but transcended by the pure aesthetic beauty of Pawlikowski and cinematographer Łukasz Żal’s haunting black-and-white images, which trap the characters in a curiously boxy, constricted aspect ratio for reasons which are rather obviously symbolic, but no less effective for it. There is, of course, no shortage of potentially symbolic elements here, this being called, after all, COLD WAR, not DYSFUNCTIONAL CODEPENDENT ROMANTIC FIXATION: THE MOVIE. But to Pawlikowski’s enormous credit, it is a character-driven work first and foremost, far more interested in the specificity of these characters and their strange, frustrating journey than in making sweeping generalizations about the historical forces which shape them. If they are to be symbols of geopolitical turmoil, it is because they are so intrinsically shaped by it, not because they exist to symbolically embody it. Their compulsive, self-destructive need for each other is every bit as fiercely real and irresistibly powerful as the relentlessly turning wheels of history which have caught them up. The result is a movie which is every bit as seductive and immediate as it ruminative and abstract, and that in may just be a rather incisive act of political filmmaking in itself.

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