Susan Granger’s review of “Cold War” (Amazon Studios)
Nominated as a Foreign Language Oscar contender, director Pawel Pawlikowski’s period love story is dedicated to his parents.
Since the English subtitles are few, fragmented and far between, the episodic plot, which begins in 1949 in newly Communist Poland, revolves around Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), an ethnomusicologist who falls in love with Zola (Joanna Kulig), a charismatic singer/dancer.
They meet when he’s the creative director and she auditions for Mazowsze, a real-life folk-and-dance group, founded by the Polish People’ Republic in the 1940s.
They fall in love and their tumultuous relationship continues on-and-off for decades, amid political upheaval, as they travel within and beyond the Iron Curtain, spending volatile interludes in Warsaw, Prague and Paris.
“The most interesting dramatic characters I’ve ever come across,” Pawlikowski says about his mother and father. They apparently fell in love, married, divorced, and betrayed each other multiple times until their deaths in 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Lukasz Zal’s monochromatic cinematography evokes nostalgia for a time when most film were in black-and-white, but – since the majority of the Polish, Russian, German, Croatian and French dialogue is not properly translated into English – making an emotional connection with the cryptic characters may be difficult for a non-linguistic viewer.
On the plus side, the background music ranges from folkloric to Soviet-era hymns to George Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess” and Bill Haley & His Comet’s “Rock Around the Clock.”
“Music is their profession. It’s what brings them together and keep them together,” Pawlikowski explains. “And music became a great device to glue this life – and this movie – together.”
Nevertheless, I found Pawlikowski’s multiple-award-winning “Ida” (2015) – about a young Polish nun who discovers she’s actually Jewish – far more accessible.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Cold War” is a frigid, forlorn 5, evoking bleak melancholy.
