I'm In Love With You And All That Jazz

Rating: 6/10 (20 January 2019)

Joanna Kulig is recruited for a Polish folk song chorus right after the War. Tomasz Kot is the arranger/conductor, and they soon begin an affair. When the chorus begins to become popular, however, it is suggested that the folk like to sing about Stalin. When they do, they are rewarded with an appearance in East Berlin, whence they plan to escape to the West. She doesn't show up, so he goes on. It takes ten years before she shows up in Paris, where he scores movies and plays in a jazz bar.
Pawel Pawlikowski's feature has been chosen as Poland's submission for this year's Best Foreign Language Movie Award, and it has a lot going for it. It has beautiful, crisp black-and-white photography - intended, no doubt to mark it as a period piece - two good looking leads and uses its musical score to cover the flowering and eventual senescence of post-war Jazz as a metaphor for the couple's relationship. However, those are the bare necessities of a good movie, which it is. As a serious contender for an Oscar, it needs to offer more than a good story, told well; at least, I would hope it should. I think it's worth seeing, if not revering.