Hot off its shockingly strong showing during the announcement
of Oscar nominations last week, Paweล Pawlikowski’s sparse love story, “Cold War” opens for a
theatrical run in Rochester. In addition to the expected nomination for Foreign
Language feature, the film earned nods for Lukasz Zal’s
lush black and white cinematography as well as a more surprising directing
nomination for Pawlikowski himself.
Set against the ruins of post-WWII Poland, “Cold War”
revolves around Wiktor (Tomasz Kot)
a middle-aged music director, and Zula (Joanna Kulig),
the young woman he falls for when she auditions for a spot in the traveling
choral ensemble he’s been tasked to create, bringing rural folk music to the
outside world.
As the pair strike up a romance, he promises her a happy life
together on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but when he defects to France,
she chooses to stay behind. From there the film follows the star-crossed lovers
over the course of the next 15 or so years, picking up with the couple as
they’re sometimes together, more often apart. As Wiktor
and Zula are separated by political, geographical, and psychological divides,
the story becomes an examination of the toll of a life in exile and the
hardships of living under a totalitarian regime.
Wiktor and Zula are two broken
people who can’t stay apart, even when their circumstances (and good sense)
tell them it’s impossible. Kulig is fantastic as the
tempestuous Zula, and her magnetic performance allows us to understand why the
smitten and sentimental Wiktor would be tempted to
follow her into oblivion.
The central couple are named after Pawlikowski’s
own parents, and though this isn’t his parents’ story directly, it is
influenced by their stormy relationship. Together off and on for nearly four
decades, theirs was a romance Pawlikowski called
“a never-ending disaster” in an interview included in the film’s press notes. With their story as inspiration, the filmmaker
conjures up a movie romance as stark and chilly as its title suggests.
This article appears in Feb 6-12, 2019.
