Cold War review: love finds a way in a jazzed-up war-torn Poland
Dir: Pawe? Pawlikowski. Cast: Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Agata Kulesza, Boris Szyc, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar. 88 mins; 15 cert
From the age of 14, Pawe? Pawlikowski found himself in exile from Poland’s Communist rule with his mother, a ballerina. Until Ida, which won him the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2015, he habitually worked in the UK rather than his native country. Ida has been life-changing for him, and certainly career-changing: he has moved back to Warsaw and switched artistic focus completely.
Pawlikowski’s even more personal new film, Cold War, is very much a companion piece to Ida, shot again in silvery black-and-white, and roughly spanning the years between the Second World War and that film. The gravitional pull of Poland, both for the director and the two characters whose love story he is telling, has a siren’s irresistibility, like some anguished folk refrain that won’t die out.
Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny. The first things we see are a set of Polish bagpipes and a fiddle being played by street musicians.
The main characters, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig), are a rangy pianist and a young singer from peasant stock, whose careers send them bounding restlessly across Europe, in and out of each other’s lives, during these decades of anxious rebuilding and unrest.
They first meet in 1949, when Wiktor and colleagues are holding auditions for a choral troupe – Mazurek – which Zula joins, raising the standard with her lively, thrusting manner, or her originality, as the soon-to-be-smitten Wiktor puts it. Their performances cause a stir in Warsaw, but the attention of the authorities isn’t necessarily desirable: before they know it, the chorus is being told to move away from classic folk repertoire and towards ballads about agricultural reform.
One step later, they’re singing under huge, idealised posters of Stalin, rhapsodising emptily about his great achievements. Wiktor’s sinister business partner (Boris Szyc) summons disturbing echoes of the recent past, meanwhile, with his concern that all the women singing should have a “pure Slav look” (read: not Jewish).
It becomes clear that they need to get out, and soon. Zula is on her way to becoming a star – a blonde, boozing good-time girl who throws herself forward into solo engagements, after she and Wiktor have separately found ways to slip the Iron Curtain. They are in love, though live just as often apart as together, in different cities for years at a time, or get involved haphazardly with other people.
Rude trumpet blasts over a fade to black herald the shift to Western Europe in 1954, as we find ourselves inside a Parisian jazz club where Wiktor sessions. He becomes a film composer, too, for a philandering director played by Cédric Kahn. The couple bicker in their garret about Zula’s recording career, but it’s out of jealousy, because she suspects Wiktor’s involvement with a poet (Jeanne Balibar) whose lyrics he’s setting to music for her.
They can’t live with or without each other, zygotes chafing at their lot. Their relationship is obviously to be understood as its own kind of cold war, a precarious treaty based on suspicion and need, with a mysterious death wish bubbling under it.
Kulig, as effervescent in her way as the young Jeanne Moreau, is the film’s life force, an alcoholic hellcat who thrusts herself into the embraces of other men – quite literally, in a reckless spree around the dance-floor of a rock’n’roll club, the camera fixated on her every move. It’s a terrific, high-showmanship sequence, as if Pawlikowski had the urge to unleash his inner Scorsese.
Kot, perhaps, is a harder actor to care about, but his stony remove gives the film contrast, and there are great, prickly scenes built around him, too. Jamming live during an evident bout of gloom, he segues into sarcastic, bloody-minded piano improv, and Pawlikowski needs only swivel the camera around to behold the unimpressed faces of his upstaged reed players. Among its many other pleasures, this can go straight next to The Fabulous Baker Boys in the rarefied pantheon of languorous scenester romances.
Somehow, it’s both pristine and jazzy – emotionally aloof by design, but still accessible. The eerie intensity of Ida isn’t quite there to grab us by the throat, but Pawlikowski supplies a related melancholy, about the pain of not knowing what you’re looking for.
As these two criss-cross each other all over post-war Europe, the very nostalgia that put them on the map redoubles its claim on them, luring them back, even after a gulag stint, and someone else’s baby, to be together. So why do they seem more lonely than ever?
