Close to being a masterpiece.

Rating: 9/10 (16 October 2018)

There are two cold wars going on in Pawel Pawlikowski astonishingly good film, (he won the Best Director prize at Cannes). The most obvious one is the one between East and West during the period in which the film is set, (it covers the years 1949 to 1964), a time when, simply moving from one country to another 'illegally' is enough to get you called a spy and sent to a prison camp for 15 years but the other cold war is the one between its protagonists, Wiktor, (an excellent Tomasz Kot), and Zula, (a stunning Joanna Kulig), who are almost crazy with love for each other but who can't live together or, it would appear, apart.
We first meet them in Poland in 1949 when Wiktor is one of a group of musicians touring rural Poland in search of authentic folk artists that they would mould into a musical company. Zula is the exceedingly pretty and talented young girl who catches Wiktor's eye; in time they have sex and start a love affair. Years pass; they meet and part and move from East to West and back again. The Cold War going on around them does little for their self-esteem. As Wiktor tries to hold it together, earning a living playing piano in a Parisian jazz club, Zula hits the bottle. Hollywood has done this kind of thing in the past but seldom with this degree of fierceness.
Pawlikowski shoots his relatively short film, (it clocks in at under 90 minutes), in a series of compact scenes that simply fade to black, mostly to denote the passage of time, in stunning black and white, (his DoP is Lukasz Zal). He also uses music to great effect, both Eastern European folk and in the second half, American jazz. If the term 'musical-comedy' is an over-used one then let's call this extraordinary film a 'musical-tragedy'.