Old Yorker

  • Cold War

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zimna wojna

    Pawel Pawlikowski (2018)

    Cold War is the story of a love affair that spans fifteen years and a large part of Europe.  It begins in Poland in 1949 and ends there in 1964, when the lovers, Zuzanna ‘Zula’ Lichoń (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot), decide to commit suicide together.  Pawel Pawlikowski, who wrote the screenplay with (the late) Janusz Glowacki, covers plenty of ground, briskly and elliptically.  Like Pawlikowski’s previous film Ida (2013), an international succès d’estime, this new one is unusually compact (85 minutes), stylishly shot in black and white by Łukasz Żal and, for me, eventually unsatisfying.

    Pawlikowski begins with fragments of folk music – performed by a group of male street singers, an old woman accompanying herself on a pedal accordion, and so on.  Wiktor and his colleague Irena (Agata Kulesza) are on the road in search of material to represent Polish folk culture, for inclusion in the repertoire of Mazurek (Mazurka), a song-and-dance troupe comprising handpicked members of the nation’s rural youth.  Accompanying and supervising the two musicologists is apparatchik Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), who shows no musical appreciation but knows what the government wants and doesn’t want, in terms of the language in which songs are sung, as well as the performers’ hair colouring:  the authorities prefer blondes.  At the auditions, fair-haired Zula does a duet with another girl.  The latter, as Irena points out, has the purer tone but she lacks the extra something Wiktor immediately perceives in Zula.  Once her companion has been dispatched and she’s auditioning alone, Zula makes clear she’s neither the preferred peasant type nor easily compliant.  She sings ‘Heart’, a ballad she heard in a Russian film that she saw.  When Irena thanks her and tries to cut her off, Zula carries on regardless (‘And the chorus …’).

    Wiktor learns from Irena that Zula served a prison sentence for stabbing her father, and asks what happened.  ‘He mistook me for my mother so I used a knife to show him the difference,’ Zula explains, ‘It’s all right – he’s not dead’.  Wiktor is supposedly old enough to be Zula’s father; the age difference between the actors playing the leads is much smaller.  In the early years of the story, Joanna Kulig is thoroughly convincing as a teenager (though temperamentally distant from them, she looks a cross between the young Hayley Mills and Anne Wiazemsky in Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar).  It’s amazing that Kulig is actually thirty-six, only five years younger than Tomasz Kot.  The chemistry between them, in combination with Zula’s unusual backstory and behaviour, makes the beginnings of the affair compelling.  Lying on the grass with him beside a lake, Zula tells Wiktor that she loves him, will be with him ‘until the end of the world’ but has also been ‘ratting’ on him to Kaczmarek.  She assures Wiktor she’s not really given anything away but he stalks off angrily, turning back only when he hears a splash.  Zula has jumped into the lake – because, it seems, she felt like it.  She floats, Ophelia-like, on her back, singing her audition solo ‘Heart’.

    Along with the two charismatic main actors, the eclectic collection of music in Cold War is its most distinctive feature.  Under Wiktor’s and Irena’s tutelage, Mazurek give a performance in Warsaw that Kaczmarek acclaims as ‘a real calling card for our culture’.  The troupe’s repertoire soon features hymns to agricultural policy and to Stalin.  (Irena, who isn’t keen on this trend, quickly disappears.)  By now, Wiktor and Zula are lovers and he plans that they defect to the West while Mazurek are in East Berlin in 1952, participating in a Communist youth festival.  The Berlin Wall is nine years in the future but Zula loses her nerve and Wiktor defects alone.  The film picks him up in 1954 in Paris, where he makes a musical living playing piano in a jazz club.  Billie Holiday is on the record player in his apartment.  After joining him in France later in the decade, Zula records a jazz-cum-chanson version of ‘Heart’ (effectively the film’s theme song) and, at a party, dances with crazy abandon to ‘Rock Around the Clock’.  Back in Poland in 1964, she’s a club singer, delivering a faux-Mexican number called ‘Bongo!’ – culturally anomic garbage that’s the antithesis of the traditional Polish folk music that kicked the film off.  Zula performs ‘Bongo!’ wearing a black wig over her once-prized fair hair, though she’s now also the mother of a blonde-haired infant.

    Zula and Wiktor are separated for much of the time – by living in different countries or, once they’ve both returned to Poland, through his temporary imprisonment as a political prisoner – but these aren’t the only obstacles to happiness.  In Paris, they don’t enjoy each other’s company except in bed and are always suspicious about each other’s ex-lovers.  Zula in particular hates Wiktor’s Parisian friend Juliette (Jeanne Balibar), both for her pretentious translation into French of the lyrics of ‘Heart’ and for the fact that Juliette and Wiktor once had a fling.  The film’s European tour includes (as well as an episode in Yugoslavia) an excursion to Rome, where Zula is briefly married to an Italian, whom she leaves to come to Paris.   Her and Wiktor’s other romantic allegiances are always short-lived.  They’re people who can’t live together continuously, thanks to enduring personal tensions as well as geographical circumstances that divide them.  They can’t live without each other either.

    Pawlikowski has said that he based the protagonists (not, one hopes, their suicide pact) on his own parents.  It’s clear that he also intends the relationship, the nomadic narrative and the film’s musical trajectory to reflect a much broader theme – the tug of homeland, the need for roots.  The French version of ‘Heart’ is called ‘Loin de toi’, a phrase that, even if Juliette didn’t intend this, seems to refer to Poland as much to a human love.  Wiktor follows Zula back there, in spite of the risks of doing so.  When Zula visits him in prison, he tells her to be more pragmatic in her choice of men and she follows his advice.  In the last part of Cold War, she is married to Kaczmarek (the father of her child); still well connected in the Communist regime, he pulls strings to get Wiktor out of jail.  Reunited once more, Zula and Wiktor conduct a brief DIY marriage ceremony, on the site of the same ruined church they wandered through early in the film, and prepare to die.  Each swallows a handful of tablets.  The closing line is Zula’s:  she decides they should spend their final moments across the road from where they’re now standing – ‘The view is better from the other side’.  For this couple, Poland is both indispensable and, behind the Iron Curtain, intolerable.

    Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot both have one dominant look.  Her sulky ingénue glamour fuses little girl lost and femme fatale.  His keen eyes flash wariness and humour.  (He also has a great, strictly rationed, smile.)  Their magnetism, reinforced by novelty (though Kulig was in Ida in a much smaller role), made the Cold War trailer unusually absorbing but Kulig and Kot don’t have the same impact over the course of the film as a whole.  The characters they’re playing are less substantial than their context.  Though you always sense the presence of two fine actors, they become part of the unarguable style of the piece.  There’s good support from Borys Szyc and Agata Kulesza (who played the key role of the title character’s aunt in Ida.)

    According to Wikipedia, Pawel Pawlikowski was fourteen when he ‘left communist Poland with his mother for London. What he thought was a holiday, turned out to be a permanent exile[1].   If he spent more time with his mother than with his father, this could explain why Zula is the dominant character in the story – right through to its conclusion, when she takes the lead in the marriage ceremony, the doling out of tablets (‘You need more – you’re heavier’) and the choice of final viewpoint.  Because it’s inspired by something Pawlikowski experienced personally, the central relationship may well, for him, be thoroughly and inevitably true.  My difficulty with Cold War was that, as its metaphorical aspect became more salient, I gradually lost belief in the attachment between Zula and Wiktor as individuals.  The doomed love affair seemed more and more a given, a vehicle for the larger political aspect.  In interviews, Pawlikowski is reliably interesting and enjoyable to listen to.  (His acceptance speech at the Oscars, where Ida won for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015, was one of the most engaging of recent years.)   His films look extraordinarily good.  He’s an unusually succinct storyteller.  He deals with themes that are worthwhile, to put it mildly.  I would really like to like his work more than I do.

    31 August 2018

    [1] The phrase ‘permanent exile’ is an overstatement.  Pawlikowski, also according to Wikipedia, moved back to Poland once his two children had grown up.  He now lives in Warsaw, close to his childhood home.  (His first wife died in 2006.  He remarried in 2017.)

  • BlacKkKlansman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Lee (2018)

    The prologue to Spike Lee’s film starts with a clip from a famous scene in Gone with the Wind – the overhead shot of dead and wounded soldiers in the Atlanta railyard, Scarlett O’Hara moving among them, the Confederate flag flying above, an elegiac version of ‘Dixie’ on the soundtrack.   Next comes a vehement, gaffe-strewn address to camera by Dr Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin), a fictional white supremacist, with scenes from D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation playing in the background.  Brief opening titles for BlacKkKlansman follow, with the legend:  ‘Dis joint is based on some fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t’.  Lee then tells the stranger-than-fiction true story of how, in the late 1970s, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a young black police officer in Colorado Springs, infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and spoke ‘white’ enough on the phone to fool David Duke (Topher Grace), Grand Wizard of the Knights of the KKK.

    The film concludes with news footage from the ‘Unite the Right’ Charlottesville rally in August 2017; Trump’s assertion that the white nationalists there included ‘some very fine people’; and a clip of the real, sixtysomething David Duke, expressing hope that the rally is a step towards the restoration of the proper racial order of America.  Lee finally dedicates his movie to Heather Heyer, the young white counter-protester who died at the Charlottesville rally, with the words ‘Rest in Power’.  The Charlottesville film includes a shot of the car that killed Heyer careering into the crowd – an aerial shot that rhymes with the Gone with the Wind one.  This insert is presumably actual drone footage of the event rather than an image designed by Lee.  Even so, he has concocted a rich mix of reality and invention – not everything is fo’ real.  It sometimes feels as if nearly every American film that appears nowadays is described as an insight into the power of fake news, a critique of the racism and paranoia that helped bring about, and help sustain, the Trump presidency.  BlacKkKlansman merits the description more than most.

    The story starts with Stallworth, a recent college graduate, at interview for a job in the Colorado Springs Police Department.  On appointment as the Department’s first-ever African-American officer, he’s consigned to the records office desk, where he’s stultified and treated with varying degrees of contempt by white colleagues.  Stallworth tells the police chief Bridges (Robert John Burke) he’s desperate to do undercover work.  He gets his chance when Bridges assigns him to infiltrate a rally to be addressed by the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael (who has recently adopted his new name, Kwame Ture).  In the light of this, Bridges moves Stallworth to the CSPD’s intelligence unit.  He sees a newspaper advertisement for Ku Klux Klan membership and comes up with his idea.   His sergeant (Ken Garito) is supportive and Stallworth makes a call to local chapter president Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold).  The subsequent infiltration process involves Stallworth speaking on the phone to local Klan members (and Duke, in the first instance to expedite his KKK membership application).  A fellow detective, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), posing as Ron Stallworth, meets the Klansmen face to face.

    From Kennebrew Beauregard’s spiel onwards, Spike Lee stresses the prominence of anti-semitism and ‘Jewish conspiracies’ in KKK dogma:  the partnership of an African-American and a Jew in this undercover work is, in dramatic terms, entirely apt.  (It’s also, according to at least one adverse criticism of the film, a fiction.)  At the outset, neither man is racially politicised, though Stallworth is necessarily aware of his ethnicity and puzzled why his partner doesn’t ‘have skin in the game’.   Zimmerman explains his family weren’t practising Jews; he wasn’t bar-mitzvahed.  He starts to see things differently once Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Pääkkönen), the most rabid member of the local chapter, subjects him at gunpoint to a ‘Jewish lie-detector’ test.  In their car parked nearby, Stallworth listens in on Zimmerman’s wire and aborts the test by throwing a stone through Kendrickson’s window.

    In spite of its alarming subject matter, BlacKkKlansman is highly entertaining – an exciting crime thriller as well as a potent black-comedy polemic.  The screenplay, adapted from Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott and Lee, has fluent, incisive dialogue and is well structured, with some neat rhymes.  The starting point is a visit to Colorado Springs by a leading light of Black Power.  The climax takes place during an appearance in Colorado Springs by a notorious Klansman:  Duke is present for the formal induction into the KKK of Stallworth in the form of Zimmerman.  Stallworth’s first important assignment involves pretending not to be a cop, among the black Colorado College students who invited Kwame Ture to speak; at the business end of the film, he’s given the job of providing police security for Duke on his visit.  Zimmerman twice manages to avoid having his cover blown through split-second interventions.  The first is intentional (Stallworth’s stone through the window), the second accidental.  A man called Walker (Nicholas Turturro), attending the KKK reception for Duke, recognises Zimmerman as the officer who once got him put in jail.  Walker tells Kendrickson.  The latter, on the point of putting Duke in the picture, is called urgently to the phone.

    The caller is Kendrickson’s wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), whose job it is to place a bomb, made by Walker, at a civil rights rally taking place to mark Duke’s appearance in Colorado Springs.  Stallworth, noting Connie’s odd behaviour and swift exit from the induction event, alerts the police at the rally venue.  Their response panics Connie, who phones to ask her husband what to do next.  He tells her to implement ‘plan B’, targeting instead the home of the black student union leader Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier).  Patrice and Connie are the only two significant female characters and it’s disappointing that the former is the one important role that’s underwritten.  Patrice and Stallworth take an immediate liking to each other when he shows up at the Kwame Ture event; they continue to see each other and it’s some time before he owns up to being a cop – the admission scene is a rare perfunctory, underpowered moment in BlacKkKlansman.  Connie’s first appearance is relatively weak too.  Serving sandwiches to the Klansmen at a chapter meeting, she’s humiliated by Felix’s dismissal of her.  In the presence of the others, she tells him he’ll need her help one day.  (As tends to happen when someone in a movie says that, she’s vindicated.) Yet outsize Ashlie Atkinson, thanks to fearless engagement with her character, later provides one of the alarming highlights of the film.  Snuggled up in bed with Felix, the weirdly childlike Connie chatters about what they’re going to do to black people.  All our dreams, she murmurs in sleepy ecstasy, are going to come true.

    You don’t expect political subtlety from Spike Lee and you seldom get it here but he and his co-writers illustrate differences of degree in the racism at work in the police force – between, for example, Chief Bridges and the corrupt, abusive CPSD officer Landers (Frederick Weller) – and even in the ardent bigotry of the Klansmen.  There’s a distance between the canny, controlled Walter Breachway and the sweaty, bug-eyed Felix, with the vilely droll fatso Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser) somewhere in between.  I’m usually dubious about presenting the baddies in a political polemic as ridiculous but there really is no option here, and mocking them doesn’t dilute their viciousness.  Trump’s brief appearance alone is compelling confirmation there’s such a thing as an appallingly powerful nitwit.  Connecting malignity and idiocy also helps Lee deliver an effective comedy-of-errors climax.  Connie can’t fit the explosive device into Patrice’s mailbox and puts it under her car instead.  Felix, Ivanhoe and Walker arrive on the scene, park beside Patrice’s car and, when the bomb detonates, are killed in the explosion.

    The Gone with the Wind clip introduces race and the representation of African Americans in film history as a persistent and supple theme of BlacKkKlansman.  It’s there, most obviously, in the reprise of Birth of a Nation, which is screened at Ron Stallworth’s KKK induction.  (The enthusiastic reception of the audience is a bit overdone.)  It’s there in David Duke’s creepy moment of nostalgia for a Mammy figure from his own childhood, in Ron’s conversation with Patrice about the blaxpoitation films of the early 1970s (Spike Lee’s teenage years) and their heroes – Richard Roundtree’s Shaft vs Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest in Super Fly.   It’s there too in some of the casting.  While the KKK are inducting Stallworth, an elderly African-American activist is recalling, in an address to Patrice and her fellow students, a white lynch mob’s torture and killing of a friend and contemporary back in 1916:  the activist is played by ninety-one-year-old Harry Belafonte, whose social activism has outlasted his movie stardom.  The protagonist is played by a man whose father’s screen career, including the lead in several Spike Lee Joints – Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, Inside Man – has endured like no other African-American actor’s to date.

    You occasionally hear Denzel Washington in the voice of his son, who gives a strong performance.  One of his finest moments comes early on, when Ron Stallworth is at the Kwame Ture rally and, as he records the event, accomplishing a double concealment.  Stallworth not only has to hide his true identity from the people immediately surrounding him.  In his vocal reactions to the speech, which will be heard on the recording he’s making for CSPD, he must also control his emotional reactions to Ture’s rallying cry.  Washington is well supported by the dependably acute Adam Driver as Zimmerman and by Topher Grace.  Grace does well to play David Duke straight; as a result, he is sinister and comical, the qualities Lee is looking to balance more generally.  With some help from a 1970s hairdo and clothes, Grace makes Duke, as well as intellectually vain, a bit grotty and shopsoiled, even though he’s only in his late twenties.  (Topher Grace is forty:  maybe that helped too.)

    Winding up the tension as he cross-cuts between the KKK gathering and the civil rights demonstrators, between chants of White Power and Black Power, Spike Lee has lost little of the dynamism he showed in Do the Right Thing nearly thirty years ago.  (Terence Blanchard’s score and Barry Alexander Brown’s editing give him considerable assistance.)  In view of his back catalogue, it’s striking that one objection that’s been made to the largely well-received BlacKkKlansman is that Lee is too kind to the police – particularly in a late sequence that shows Ron Stallworth and his colleagues celebrating the success of their project as one happy multi-racial team.  Stallworth’s appointment as Duke’s bodyguard for the day is probably an instance of Lee’s sacrificing credibility for comic effect; if taken literally, though, it suggests the CSPD was able and willing to rise above its own collective racism in order to demonstrate contempt for the Ku Klux Klan.  That also sounds like wishful thinking but Lee certainly isn’t soft-pedalling in the extended finale that culminates in the Charlottesville footage.  He pushed his politically angry message too hard in Do the Right Thing.  What’s finally shocking about BlacKkKlansman is that you don’t feel its force is the result of distortion or exaggeration.  In the current political climate of America, Spike Lee, at sixty-one, looks like a director whose time has come as never before.

    30 August 2018

Posts navigation