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.)
