Cold War

Aesthetically perfect, narratively frustrating

It's very much to do with my parents - the world they lived in that kind of shaped them, tripped them up. But it's also about two people who are very strong individuals, and very attractive. My father was an old-fashioned guy who said a woman has to fit in, and my mother just didn't at all. Their story had betrayal, and separations, getting together again, having a baby, then divorcing and really falling out horribly, then leaving the country separately. My father escaped. My mom married an English guy in order to leave Poland, with me in tow, when I was 14. But then my parents met abroad again a couple of years later and fell in love, and decided they wanted to be together. They dumped their spouses and got married, and ended up living together in Germany, in exile. Then they quarrelled, and she had an affair with some other guy, much younger. But they ended up together because they were both tired, too tired to fight after 40 years of this stuff.

My mother was a ballerina in the first half of her life and she screwed up her back. She had scoliosis, which she didn't look after, and then she had three operations that went wrong. She was in corsets, and there was morphine. My father had three heart attacks; he was a heavy smoker and drinker. They were quite young when they died, 57 and 67, but they died together in a not dissimilar fashion to what you see in the film. Just before they died they were, for two or three years, the happiest couple. They came to realise they had nothing but each other. The countries change. The boyfriends, girlfriends, wives change. Politics change. But they realized that the only thing in the world is her, is him.

_It's the mother of all love stories in a way. But it didn't seem like a love story throughout. It felt like a really bad marriage. God forbid you have such a love story. You'd rather have just a normal relationship. In this stable place. In one country, ide...

The film that made me fall in love with cinema. And later become and actor! Every frame aches. Every glance is a trapdoor. Cold War is a masterclass in restraint - two souls orbiting each other through music, war, and impossible borders. Love doesn’t always survive history. Sometimes, it is history.

With the Second World War barely behind them, musical maestro “Wiktor” (Tomasz Kot) is on the lookout for some new talent to front his Polish folk outfit. Touring the still devastated and recovering rural communities of his country with producer “Irena” (Agata Kukesza), they aren’t really having much luck. Returning to set up a music school with apparatchik “Kaczmarek” (Borys Szyc) he espies “Zula” (Joanna Kulig). She is formidably ambitious, can sing and can dance but more than that - she has that little je ne sais quoi that he thinks he needs. Of course, what starts off as a purely practical business arrangement swiftly becomes way more than that, but with the resurgent communists readily installing their iron curtain what chance anything can come of their burgeoning relationship - or that he can trust her not to report his indiscretions should her success not manifest itself they way she hoped? Unfortunately for them, they actually prove to be quite successful with a public desperate for entertainment, and so are soon finding the hand of the government on their collars and given a programme that borders on the puppetry. He soon tires of this manipulation and decides to defect to Germany. He hopes with her, but when she gets cold feet he leaves her behind. Perhaps that will be an end of things? It might just be the crispness of the monochrome photography that so stylishly framed this somewhat epic tale of love, but somehow this rather traditional tale of forbidden affection manages to rise above the melodramatic and present us with something altogether more personable. Both Kot and Kulig play well, accentuating that although there is certainly a passion between them, these two are not exactly a couple made in heaven, either. Indeed, it’s these powerful opposites that provide much of the attractions of the characterisations here, even if they do stretch the bounds of plausibility at times and it all left me feeling a little ambivalent about their chances of success...