Triumph of form (over content)

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2018)

The cold war between the western and the communist worlds has undoubtedly marked the life of anybody born in the second half of the twentieth century. And, of course, it has been a subject of many great films, too numerous to list here. Naming the film "Cold War" can therefore either be taken as being ironic, or very ambitious. I am not sure, but I think the director Pawel Pawlikowski meant it mostly in the latter sense, although the former is not completely excluded. Except mostly visually, the film however fails distinctly to deliver on the promise of its grandiose title.
The film depicts two passionate lovers, who are both Polish, although from different worlds, divided by culture and status. This division, however, does not matter much in the new Poland of 1949, and they, both being strikingly better looking than the people around them, fall in love. They are united by their love of and talent for music, but temperamentally, and we can guess intellectually, differ quite a bit. Their persistent desire for each other drives the plot, and we follow them through their many tribulations, first with too serious art directors, then Polish communist apparatchiks, well-meaning bur arrogant French intellectuals, each other, jazz musicians in Paris clubs, Yugoslav secret service, and even prison guards. All of this takes place over many years, and their inability to truly be together, because of themselves primarily but the external circumstances as well, is, naturally, exhausting. This leads them to an unexpected final solution for their predicament that ends the film.
The film is very well shot and put together, and contains plenty of interesting Polish folk dances and songs, which are enjoyable and worth seeing. It makes some good points about an easy corruption of true art by politics and fashions of the day. It is also hard to resist the main actress (Kulig) with her voice and spontaneity, but one is hard pressed to see why she is so enchanted with her very serene lover, except that he is a musical authority, and also happens to be exceptionally tall. The real problem starts once the viewer realizes that the film runs smoothly only by constantly remaining on the surface of things, be it their love affair, communism, or the Parisian art scene. We learn almost nothing about the basic psychology of the main protagonists, or about the communist Poland, and especially little about the wider context from the film's title, which exerts some influence over their relationship only to a rather limited degree. Everything is treated at the level of a postcard, which looks good, but was taken in an instant and was not too seriously thought through. (For example: not every artistic male in Paris had a five-day beard in the 50s; that actually became fashionable more recently and was quite atypical at that time!) Five minutes of Wajda's "Man of Marble", to name another Polish film, say more about Stalinism than the entire "Cold War". Nothing wrong with that, of course, but without this political context of the film this modern take on Romeo and Juliet would certainly not have been so enthusiastically greeted by the western audiences and the critics. In other words, if the film did not pretend to deal with certain period of world history it would have been taken for what it actually is: a not well motivated and rather naive love story.
It would be interesting to learn how the "Cold War" was greeted in Poland. A qualifier is probably warranted here: the film is in fact a Polish/British/French co-production, made by a basically British director (Pawlikowski), who is Polish by birth. To this reviewer it has a flavor of those Eastern European films made to appeal to Western festival circuit, by playing skillfully on some existing prejudices about the East. (In fact, one of more interesting scenes in the film, a brief confrontation between the main heroine and the French female poet, makes a comment on precisely this point.)
In sum, black and white photography and unusual formatting alone do not make a great film; the script matters! This may be lost on the Cannes' jury this year ("Best director" to Pawlikowski !?), and I fear may even suffice for an Oscar (it has all the necessary ingredients for the foreign film category, which is: sympathetic characters, unbridled passion, totalitarianism (preferably Russian), nice visuals), but will not fool anybody remotely familiar with the works of Wajda, Kieslowsky, or Zanussi. If it lures somebody to search for more substantial Polish cinema of the distant or more recent past, however, it has served some good purpose.