Cold War

I spent the first 33 years of my life enduring the Cold War, the sole benefit of which was that it never turned into a hot one. It seems so odd now that one of the things I had to be cognizant of at a very early age was the possible end of the world in a nuclear holocaust. Materially, however, I didn’t suffer one bit from the Cold War. The prosperity of America was unaffected by the number and magnitude of missiles that were aimed at us. In Soviet Bloc countries, however, the arms race had a direct impact on the price of bread and every other commodity. Add to the actual paucity of goods the insistence by Communist governments to redistribute wealth (except their own of course), the end result of which was arriving at a general level of poverty for everyone. 

Of the European countries that constituted what became known as the Eastern bloc, Poland had the most successful film industry and produced more world class filmmakers than all of the others combined. Some of them emigrated to the West, like Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski. Others remained in Poland, like Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Over the course of my filmgoing life I have been especially lucky to have seen so many films from Poland – and so many that left a lasting impression on me. I suppose the first one I saw was Wajda’s Kanal, which captured so brilliantly the heroism of the Polish resistance in World War II, its protagonists having to use the sewers of Warsaw to escape the Nazis. Wajda’s film set a high standard, even if it was somewhat overrated. 

Pawel Pawlikowski’s film career resembles his life. Born in Warsaw in 1957, he was taken to London with his mother when he was 14. He attended Oxford, studying literature. He directed documentaries for British television from 1989, and his first three feature films were made in England. He was cultivating an audience and winning some awards when, in the middle of what would have been his fourth feature in 2007, his first wife became gravely ill and died. The film was never finished. In 2011 he directed a multi-national co-production in Paris before returning to Poland, where he has lived ever since. In 2013 his film Ida, his first film in Polish (though it was a Polish-French-Danish co-production) was released to wide acclaim.

Cold War, released in 2018, is about Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zuzanna, or Zula (Joanna Kulig). He is the music director of a folk song and dance troupe. When the film opens in Poland in 1949, he is auditioning new talent, among whom is Zula, a young woman with striking blonde hair and smoldering eyes. She can sing and dance and seems to attract every male around her, including Wiktor and Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), who leads the company. While every aspect of life in Poland becomes more political, Wiktor and Zula develop a passionate – if erratic – love for each other. By introducing patriotic hymns to Stalin to their folk repertoire, Wiktor and Kaczmarek are rewarded with a tour – first to Warsaw, then to East Berlin. On the train to Berlin, Wiktor tells Zula he is going to defect and that she is to join him on a particular street corner. Wiktor waits there with a suitcase until it is dark, but Zula doesn’t show up. Wiktor walks out of the Russian Zone by himself (this was several years before the wall). 

Next we see Wiktor in Paris in 1954. He is playing in a jazz band (jazz was often banned in the East, so it became the music of freedom). Zula is in Paris for only one night and arranges a meeting with him. He wants her to tell him why she didn’t defect with him. She says it was because she didn’t feel she was worth it. They part in the street. She gives him a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and walks away. Then she stops, turns, and runs into his arms. 

Wiktor manages to travel to Yugoslavia where Zula’s troupe is performing. Kaczmarek sees him in front of the theater and gets him a good seat. Zula sees him in the audience, but by the next number his seat is empty. He had been escorted by plain clothes police, alerted by Kaczmarek, to the train and he goes back to Paris. The policemen walk away saying, "They say that Warsaw is the Paris of the East."

In 1957, Wiktor is in Paris in the middle of recording a film music score when a door swings open and Zula stands there, waving at him. She has married a man solely so that she could get a visa to Paris. He tells her he has waited for her. He tries to start her career as a jazz singer at the club (L’Eclipse) where he still plays. He gets her a record deal, but Zula is jealous of the songs written by a French woman Wiktor has been with. Once again, it seems, she feels inadequate, undeserving of her good luck and happiness. The record finished, Zula abruptly returns to Poland. 

Against everyone’s advice (including the Polish ambassador in Paris), Wiktor follows Zula to Poland in 1959. Because he defected, he is sentenced to imprisonment for fifteen years. Zula visits him. They have broken his right hand so he can never again play the piano. She vows to get him out. 

Finally, in 1964, Wiktor is out of prison, but only because Zula married Kaczmarek. They have a young son. She comes offstage, sees Wiktor, and falls flat on the floor. She gets up and falls into his arms. They go to a restroom where she removes her black wig and asks him to help her get out of there. 

On a brilliant sunny day, Wiktor and Zula are riding on a bus. It stops at a crossroad in front of a large field of ripe corn. There is a bench underneath a large tree. They walk together down the dirt road to an abandoned church – the same church that Kaczmarek visited early in the film.(1) The dome has collapsed, letting in all the day’s sunlight. Standing before the crude altar, where a candle and a long row of white pills are arranged, they exchange wedding vows. They vow to be together always until death parts them. They embrace, and then Zula gives Wiktor a number of the pills and she takes the rest. They go and sit on the bench by the road and watch the day wane. She says, “Let’s go to the other side. It looks better over there.” They get up and walk out of the frame. 

In Cold War, which is streaked with a poetic history, the personal and the political are kept in a very strange, inexplicable balance. Pawlikowski, with his cameraman Łukasz Żal (who also shot Ida) pull off the incredible feat of evoking the times and places of the film’s story in a way that makes us feel like time travellers. We have seen those eras and settings captured in films from Poland and France in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but never in a film shot in 2018. His two actors, Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot, seem to have stepped into the past and lived their parts the whole while, from 1949 to 1964. 

After seeing recently the predominantly grey palette of the black and white cinematography in Joel Coen’s Macbeth, it’s a pleasure to see the medium used in stark contrasts and the full spectrum of light and shadow. I haven’t seen such gorgeous black and white since Sven Nykvist’s work on Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf and Shame. The last four or five minutes of the film are like an apotheosis – for Wiktor and Zula and for us. It is overwhelmingly beautiful. 

(1) Puzzlingly, it is Kaczmarek who discovers the ruined church at the beginning of the film. Did he mention it to Wiktor?