Serving as Poland’s entry for the next Academy Awards, Cold War is the latest from Paweł Pawlikowski. It’s a sprawling and episodic romantic melodrama that follows the love between a musician, Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot) and a young singer that he discovers, Zula Lichoń (Joanna Kulig), and the various hurdles they deal with against the backdrop of – you guessed it – the cold war.
The thing that immediately strikes you the most is the visual aesthetic, which Pawlikowski is continuing from his Oscar winning Ida, with the 1.37 : 1 aspect ratio and a sharp black-and-white image. The cinematographer from Ida, Lukasz Zal, returns here, and the results are unsurprisingly stunning. The film beautifully plays with space and using it to signify the state of the characters. The framing is calculated, but effortlessly so, and it really brings a lot of life to a style that many would consider outdated.
The film also has a strange, and evocative rhythm in how it goes from one narrative beat to the next. It’s fragmented, and often jarringly so, but it never feels like it’s without purpose. It works very well with the style of the film, making it all feel like recollections, distant memories, where you don’t remember the big details, but you still feel all the raw emotions behind it. The film will go from one scene, and jump years ahead. Characters will have already experienced big changes in their life, and we’re left to fill in the gaps. Although, even that doesn’t feel completely necessary since the loose storytelling also serves as a mirror to the seismic socio-political conflicts that the characters have to navigate, to mostly complicated results. It’s like how You Were Never Really Here strips all the fat from the typical revenge movie to its bare bones, relying more on the emotional headspace of its central character than carefully spelled out plotting.
Music plays a surprisingly strong role, as the film is full of extended sequences of folk performances to night club routines. How much of the singing/dancing is performed by the actors or by doubles, I don’t know, but it’s captured gorgeously. There might be some cultural nuances I could be missing, in terms of how the songs are connected to the culture, and how they reflect the state of Europe during this time. However, it doesn’t feel like you’re losing anything, since it still manages to add a compelling layer to the story, as well as the way it’s used to show the connections between the characters.
It arguably relies on the kind of tropes you see in a lot of stories that revolve around star crossed lovers, and tragic romances. There are elements at play here that you’ve probably seen many times before. Yet, despite that, plus the jumpiness of the narrative, there’s enough specificity here that it works. There’s a soulfulness to it, one that feels deeply personal, and lived in, informing the story and characters, making it not feel like a collection of common tropes. The film ends on the text “For My Parents,” which makes me curious if the Pawlikowski is grabbing elements from his own (or rather, his parents) life.
It also helps that the performances by Kot and Kulig are excellent. They’re understated, but not one note, emotionally raw, but not unhinged, elegant, but not too posturing. They have a wonderful presence, and even better chemistry. Having the film show them as these deeply troubled and broken people makes the experience even more engaging since there’s a bittersweet melancholy to their relationship, where you want them to be happy, but you also have to come to terms with the fact that they don’t necessarily bring the best out of each other.
Cold War definitely isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, maybe even for those who loved Pawlikowski’s previous work, but he is definitely not messing around here. The ending is something that will stick with me for a while, and even before that I was admiring so much of the bold narrative swings and choices in filmmaking that Pawlikowski and his cast and crew were taking. It’s all clearly coming from a deeply personal place, and that heart and empathy can be seen in every single frame. It’s often sublime, occasionally transcendent, but it’s always achingly human.