Cold War

The first few minutes of Cold War draw you in with incredible photography (by Lukas Szal). The film is shot in Academy ratio, like the films from yesteryear, and the most dominant hue is white, as two musicologists travel around Poland to record authentic folk music. It is winter, so the world is enveloped in snow and mist.

We listen to a lot of music, and then are taken to a music school, funded by the government, to teach children about folk music and dance. During auditions, one of the pair running the school, Tomasz Kot, is drawn to the star power of a girl in pigtails (Johanna Kulig). The year is 1949, and for the next fifteen years we watch as their relationship grows and then goes off and on, all set in the backdrop of Poland behind the iron curtain.

The film is nominated for three Oscars: Cinematography (Szal), Best Director (Pawel Pawlikowski) and Best Foreign Language Film. It's a romance based on the story of his parents, and therefore ends hopefully (at east for Pawlikowski), which one doesn't necessarily expect in a film from Eastern Europe.

Kulig becomes a big star, but Zot is disillusioned by the government, leaves the country (the government forces the students to sing propaganda, which leads to them performing in front of a large photo of Stalin). He ends up in Paris, as does Kulig, who has married. The forces that drew them together are still there.

I must admit that I need to see Cold War again, because I found it hard to stay awake. Most of that is due to me being tired, but the film does have a lulling tone, with its use of blackouts (and black and white photography, I think, is less likely to rivet the viewer as vivid color). Cold War, while a very short film (it's one of the few that I've seen that ends before I think it's ready to be over), is also very subtle. It's a quiet film, although its moments of music are often lively, especially when Kulig dances to "Rock Around the Clock."

The end of the film has a touch of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, when the characters choose to leave Paris and go back to Poland (as the two lovers go back to Czechoslovakia, a similarly restricted country in Unbearable). Love trumps common sense, as it so often does in life. Even an employee at the Polish consulate in Paris asks why Zot would ever want to leave there.

I was listening to a round table discussion of screenwriters the other day and they mentioned how romance has become absent from films. Of course there are bad romantic comedies and dozens of Hallmark movies, but in the world of serious drama it's gotten lost. Cold War, like A Star Is Born, centers around the love between two people that endures through hardship. Cold War, though, has a much happier ending.