love in times of cold war

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2019)

Pawel Pawlikowski continues a tradition of remarkable film directors that left their mark in the history of cinema in the second half of the 20th century and made of the Polish film school one of the best in Eastern Europe, competing in value and number of remarkable movies only with the Soviet school of cinema. Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and young Roman Polanski made wonderful films despite Communist censorship, fighting and tricking the censors and using cinema as a mean of social and political protest using the tools of art. 30 years passed since the fall of the Communist regimes in Poland and the rest of Europe, but film makers from that part of the world continue to get back obsessively to those times. They do it now with a different perspective, and free of political constraints. Did time heal the wounds? Maybe, at least in part, but there are lessons to be learned, traumas carried over generations and realities that perpetuate in mentality that invite to thought and debate.
'Cold War' (the original title is 'Zimna wojna') tells a non-conventional love story that takes place in troubled times. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is a musician and co-founder of a musical institution for talented young people trying to promote authentic Polish folklore - music and dance - in the conditions of increased ideological pressures. Zula (Joanna Kulig) is one of his pupils, a young and beautiful girl, just out of a troubled childhood. Their relationship goes against all the conventions because of age gap, social status, cultural level, puritan rules of morality. Poland is hardly a place were their relationship can blossom .Aspiring for freedom they will cross the Iron Curtain on both directions, but hardly find happiness or accomplishment in the Paris of the 1950s either. The impossibility of their love - is it caused by the hardship of time, or by personal incompatibility? I did not get a clear answer even after the last frame of the film.
What I liked. The whole cinematographic concept - black and wide, narrow screen format - fits well the story and makes a reverence also to the cinema of the period when the action takes place. The music is fabulous. It starts with real folklore songs, continues with the processed folklore mixed with the hymns to Stalin which was promoted in the Communist countries at that time, switches to jazz and French chansons for the time spent by the heroes in Paris, and returns to the 'light music' of the early 60s in Poland. Music tells as much about the period as the story itself. The settings and the atmosphere are carefully designed, from the muddy desolated landscape of Poland in 1949, passing through the Berlin of 1952 still bearing the scars of war, the Paris of the 1950s undergoing the Americanized healing, and back to the Poland of the late 50s and 60s, with its own version of the Gulag but also with the false shining of life 'normalized' under Communist control. All these are realistic and credible.
What I liked less. Although both Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot are fine actors and their individual performance are good, their relationship does not look at any moment too credible on screen. Hard to tell if their lack of chemistry is intentional or not, but they never seem to fit one with the other, and their love story looks as cold as the war which gives the title to the movie. This surprising lack of vibration lessens the final impression about a movie with many qualities and certainly worth watching.