Mark Reviews Movies: COLD WAR (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 20, 2018

Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) might believe that they are in love. They might even legitimately be in love. The evidence presented in Cold War, though, suggests otherwise.

After spending a few years in close proximity and barely hiding their affair, the couple spends over a decade mostly apart. They see each other occasionally, when their travels and/or their schedules allow, and they even spend a relatively considerable amount of time together in Paris. The time starts with kisses and sex and romantic proclamations. It quickly descends, though, into the real routine of their relationship: bitterness, uncertainty, jealousy, anger, and wanting to get away from each other.

At one point, Wiktor says that Zula is "the woman of my life." He's not lying, and that's what makes this anti-romance from co-writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski so mundanely tragic—well before it inevitably ends, within the scope of drama, like a tragedy.

Pawlikowski and his fellow screenwriter Janusz Glowacki set this story in Europe between 1949 and 1964 on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain between the Soviet bloc and the West. The two lovers come from Poland. Wiktor is a professional, educated musician. Zula is a peasant with a criminal record (an attack on her father, the details of which change depending on whether one listens to the rumors or to her, who might not be the most honest of witnesses to her own actions). She can sing, though. That, along with her striking looks, appeals to Wiktor. Zula is drawn to him, as well, for unspoken reasons that are probably as hollow as the one's behind Wiktor's infatuation—that he's handsome and talented.

This isn't a deep romance, forming between two people who find some connection based on some deep and shared ideas, outlooks, characteristics, or anything of that sort. That seems to be intentional on the part of Pawlikowski and Glowacki, who breeze through the story's 15 years in less than 90 minutes.

There might be more time spent listening to and hearing discussions about music than there is hearing the couple talk about themselves as individuals and as a pair. The music is what initially brings them together, and like everything else about their relationship, it later serves as another reason to split them apart. Whether or not they are actually in love is pointless. They are in love with the idea of this love.

They meet while Wiktor, Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), and Irena (Agata Kulesza) are putting together a show that will highlight the talents of the peasants throughout Poland. Zula is one of the many who audition for the show, which eventually travels throughout the communist countries allied with the Soviet Union. It's a great success, and the Polish government, based on some advice from Moscow, eventually turns it into a propaganda vehicle, with a giant banner of Joseph Stalin rising behind the choir.

The politics here streamlined into an additional dividing force between Wiktor and Zula. Neither of them really cares about such matters, but Wiktor sees more potential for his career in the promise of the West. Zula, who has never seen much promise in anything in her life, agrees to defect with him after a performance in East Berlin. On the night the two have planned to escape to West Berlin, she doesn't show, and he leaves anyway, heading to Paris.

Years pass, and then more years pass, until we're left questioning how this seemingly shallow relationship has taken up so much time and energy for these two people. There are flashes of lust and, perhaps, love between them, but for the most part, they grow in separate ways.

Wiktor begins dating at least one other woman, a poet (played by Jeanne Balibar) with whom he's honest when she asks if he had been with another woman after returning home late. Zula marries twice over the course the story. The first time, it's to an Italian man, so that she can legally enter the West. That's when she and Wiktor try to make a life together in Paris, only for their respective and collective miseries to put an end to that. The second marriage is out of convenience and, because of the turns that Wiktor's life and desires for Zula take, in order to help the man she believes she loves.

After the couple's initial meeting and sudden romance (It's threatened almost immediately upon learning about it, when Zula admits that she has been "ratting on" Wiktor to Kaczmarek) at an idyllic country estate in Poland, all of this becomes stark and restrictive. That's not only because of Lukasz Zal's black-and-white cinematography or Pawlikowski's choice of a boxy aspect ratio—not to mention how the main characters are sometimes situated near the bottom of the frame, with a tall expanse of space above them. It's not simply the constant threat that Wiktor is under, especially when he travels to Yugoslavia to see Zula, only to be escorted out of the country by government agents.

All of this heightens the main reason for the despair of Cold War: that these two people are intertwined in a potentially destructive relationship for reasons that they don't even seem to comprehend. In being kept apart by the political circumstances of the time, the idea of the other person grows in unrealistic ways, and it's inescapable that the ideal can never match reality. The couple has two final decisions here. The first is more significant in recognizing the reality of their situation. The second is far more ordinary, but in choosing the best seat for a view of the sunset, it's trying to capture that ideal—if only for a moment.

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