Interesting, and a suggestive reminder of Camus-styled existentialism

Rating: 7/10 (9 February 2019)

Here between us, however patriotic a Polish of the 1945 Generation might be, who would prefer the Iron Curtain to Paris? especially Wiktor, an outstanding musician, who had sufferingly left the love of his life, the pretty Zula, behind in suffering Poland. This movie is another flagrant case of style & form to the detriment of content. ¨Cold War¨ may even win an Oscar - it has two basic ingredients - rampant passions and Soviet totalitarianism, - but it hardly reaches a comparison with the best film essays by Wajda and Kieslowski, to name only two Polish masters contemporary of the Cold War era in real life.
The cinematography, the items of the musical soundtrack and the excerpts from ballet folk choreographies are admirable attractions here. An impressive visual treatment evokes the New Waves of the 1950s and 1960s, but the plot is elliptical: loose and barely sketched, neither sufficiently enveloping the spectator nor spelling clearly its philosophical sense or the author's ultimate message, whose protagonist has a weak personality. Wiktor sacrifices his art to Stalinist Jdanovism and his life and his freedom to such an ungrateful, unfaithful partner, Zula, a selfish, spoiled and annoying young girl - herein, supposedly, a femme fatale.
One can try a Camusian approach to this film. Wiktor and Zula had already lived throughout the WWII. The Cold War, which was not properly a war, began simultaneously with the end of the horrors of WWII. The film takes place between 1949 and 1964 and places on the table, even though metonymically and indirectly, the great questions of existentialism, a doctrine that had its apogee and greater popular influence precisely in the 1950s and early 1960s - especially on account of Albert Camus.
Wiktor, an intellectual and an eclectic (folk, classical, be-bop) musician, flees from the Iron Curtain to Paris in 1951 - the year in which Camus published "The Man in Revolt" - L'Homme Révolté or The Rebel. Because he was not a supporter of the Cold War between US/NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Camus was considered an eccentric, and therefore criticized by the right, the left, and the center. His fidelity was towards truth, not ideology. He was opposed to state assassinations, terrorism and wars in every quarter. An artistic anarchist, with a passionate spiritual hunger, an austere and moral Don Juan, a sensual man of conscience and honor who earned a reputation for a lifelong literary meditation on death in all its forms: illness (he suffered from tuberculosis ), murder, suicide, death penalty, war, etc. One of his first novels is "The Happy Death"; death as "happy" as absurd, at one time as sudden as slow. Likewise in the movie "Cold War". Camus's enemies were social injustice, political perversion, the powerful who thought they had the right to make others suffer and die for their perverted purposes, liberal imperialism, Soviet Marxism, and abstract ideologies in general.
Popularly known for his writings on absurdity (which for Camus was only a necessary first step to revolt, and eventual suicide), when he died on January 4, 1960 in a car accident in France having in his pocket an unused train ticket, the press explored the absurdist nature of his death! The media still do so. But did it really happen like that? There is a conspiracy theory that, instead of an automobile accident, Camus might have been murdered by the KGB because of his criticism of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the massacre of Hungarian freedom fighters and his defense of Boris Pasternak and the novel, Doctor Jivago, among other things.
According to such theory, the accident that cost Camus' life would have been organized by Soviet spies who damaged the tire of the car using sophisticated equipment that cut it, or caused it to be slashed at high speed.
Camus's exegetes soon rejected the idea. But a book called ¨Camus must die¨ recalled another mysterious death, in 2013, of journalist Michael Hastings in the United States, when his car accelerated to more than 100 miles per hour and exploded against a tree on a highway in Los Angeles.
Whatever the cause of Camus's death was, of course we can echo his voice today. He served beauty and suffering, he defended the innocent in this basically murderous world, he was haunted by images that still haunt us, as of 2019 preys of megalomaniacs and paranoids suffering from the Syndrome of Hubris and feeding dreams of conquest. We remain in an absurd prison, threatened by madmen brandishing small and large arms.
The world as a prison is of course a metaphor with a long and popular tradition. Over the last hundred years or more, with the secularization of Western culture and the perception of God's "alienation," the gates of that prison took popular imagination with a growing number of people feeling trapped in an kind of alien universe , unable to unite the abyss between themselves and a supposedly absent God. Death has become for many the symbol of the absurdity of existence and the futility of flight. It used to be, though, for the faithful like Wiktor or Zula, an open road to free eternity.