Dig deeper, People!

Rating: 9/10 (11 February 2019)

It's amazing how so many people miss the real meaning of this film, even though the title literally hits you over the head with it - COLD WAR.
Yes, superficially it is a love story between two people, but it's so much more than that.
Put yourself in Poland in 1949 when the movie begins - What was going on? Russia was grinding out the souls of the Polish people and replacing it with Communist doctrine, turning human beings into bricks in the wall.
The essence of this film is the fight to remain a Pole while a mass dehumanization is going on all around you.
Both leads struggle with it, within the system and without.
They're pulled away and then drawn back, both to each other and to Poland.
Compromises are made along the way, humiliations are swept under the rug but they still tear at the heart.
When you're under someone's thumb, you fight back in little ways - The girl gets married to an official, not for love but for advantage, then as she tells her true love later - it doesn't count because it was not in church.
Poland is one of the most Catholic countries in the world, we're brought back to that for the ending where the two lovers finally 'get married' in a real church, or what the Soviet Union failed to destroy. It was a symbol of love but even more than that a symbol of defiance during the... COLD WAR.