Cold War (Zimna wojna)

Director Paweł Pawlikowski

Director Paweł Pawlikowski with actress Joanna Kulig

Pawlikowski with actor Tomasz Kot, actress Joanna Kulig (left), and actor Borys Szyc (right)

COLD WAR (Zimna wojna)              B+                  

Poland  France  Great Britain  (90 mi)  2018  d:  Pawel Pawlikowski

Through this world, you will enter a world of music, song, and dance.

―Irena (Agata Kulesza)

Paweł Pawlikowski pays tribute to his parent’s generation (actually dedicating this film to his parents) in this follow-up to the Oscar-winning 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida, returning once again to Poland with a curiously updated Dr. Zhivago-style epic romance set against the grim backdrop of Europe after WWII, shot in crisp black and white by Łukasz Żal, returning to the 4:3 aspect ratio showing a self-contained world, spanning more than a decade from the late 40’s to the early 60’s, where it’s something of a romanticized love letter to surviving through bleak times, using an atypical style, as this is at heart an unconventional song and dance musical, moving from folk songs to free-form jazz.  Props must go out to musician Marcin Masecki for all the jazz and song arrangements, and dance choreographer Stefano Terrazzino, aided by Grzegorz Cherubiński, Anna Pas, and Piotr Zalipski for the singlemost show-stopping number of the film, but the story is loosely based on the Mazowsze Dance Group, a Polish Folk Song and Dance Ensemble (The History of Mazowsze - Our history - State Folk Group of Song and ...) that still exists today.  Winner of the Best Director award at Cannes this year, the story is set in the ruins of post-war Poland, following the exploits of a brooding pianist/composer named Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a sophisticated and educated man from the city, and a wild singer/dancer called Zula (Joanna Kulig), posing as a peasant girl from the countryside, with notably different backgrounds and temperaments, yet they are fatally attracted to one another despite character differences, regional borders and political boundaries, each caught in different countries in the 1950’s, traveling through Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia, and Paris, separated by time and the unfortunate twists of fate, yet somehow they maintain what amounts to a mismatched love affair, as passionate as it is destructive.  Described as “an impossible love story in impossible times,” the real Wiktor and Zula (the actual names of the director’s parents) died in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, having spent the previous forty years together on and off, breaking up, and then chasing after each other on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  According to the director, “They were both strong, wonderful people, but as a couple a neverending disaster.” 

At the outset, Wiktor and Irena (Agata Kulesza from IDA) are musical collaborators scouring the countrysides and recording folk songs, eventually auditioning singers and dancers for a musical group called the Mazurek ensemble (inspired by the Mazowsze troupe) that showcase the authentic sounds of Poland, declaring “No more will the art of the people go to waste!”  There is something of a playful beginning, with the free-spirited Zula pretending to be a village girl, singing a harmonized duet with another girl she just met while standing in line, but she stands out (though Irena notes the other girl has perfect pitch), with Wiktor asking her to sing a solo, but instead of performing a Polish mountain tune she surprisingly sings a Russian song, claiming she learned it from a traveling Russian movie.  While Irena detects a con job, Wiktor sees “something else,” growing fascinated by her talent and vibrant energy, asking at one point whether the rumors are true that she was jailed for killing her father, and without missing a beat she blurts out, “He mistook me for my mother, so I used a knife to show him the difference.”  With that she becomes the star of the show, and the muse of Wiktor, who falls madly in love, though as extroverted as she is, he’s equally as introverted.  It’s a match made in heaven, as Zula couldn’t be more captivating, on stage and off, and both are enthralled with what the other can offer them.   The simplistic beauty of their music begins to sound distinctively Slavic, including one of their standard folk numbers, Mazowsze 'Dwa serduszka'The Little Hearts - YouTube (2:39), which quickly transitions into a tribute to Stalin, Zimna Wojna - Dwa serduszka (Two Hearts - Mazowsze ... - YouTube (3:00), where their troupe is little more than a propaganda tool, with party hack Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc) ordering Zula to spy on Wiktor, who barely cares at all, where the winds of change costs Irena her job, as she refuses to capitulate, while Wiktor grows desperately moody and distraught, feeling like a caged animal needing to escape the tightening grip of Stalinism (which banned the playing of jazz music), where they dream of escaping to the creative freedom of the West.  For Zula, on the other hand, Communism is just fine, as she’s never had it so good, traveling to all the Eastern bloc countries as the star of the show, receiving tributes and plenty of adulation.  But when they have a performance in East Berlin in 1952, Wiktor spots an opening and grabs the chance, begging Zula to come with him, where curiously enough before the Wall, you could simply walk across the checkpoint, but it is not to be.

From the dance halls in Poland and Germany to the smoke-filled jazz clubs of Paris and the L’Eclipse nightclub, Wiktor leads a small jazz combo, living in a tiny loft apartment earning a living doing what he loves best, composing music for films, taking refuge in his art, matching the mindset and perspective of the film, which almost makes him forget the “woman of his life” that he left behind, where the chill of loneliness punctuates his every note.  While there are significant time jumps, years later when Zula suddenly arrives out of nowhere to Paris, free as a bird, it reignites a whirlwind relationship, putting Zula onstage as a sultry jazz singer, singing a range of songs that adds to her risqué persona as a femme fatale star wherever she goes, even recording a record together, though she quickly gets bored in Paris, drinking heavily, beautifully expressed in what is the scene of the film which explodes with energy and passion, dancing to Bill Haley & the Comets signature song Rock Around the Clock, Cold War di Pawel Pawlikowski | CLIP 1 - YouTube (1:49), spontaneous like Anna Karina in early Godard films, literally erupting with a volcanic force, allowing her fiery disposition a sensuous release, never more liberated anywhere else in the film.  Impulsive, jealous, and oftentimes malicious, Zula falls into that Western trap of leading a life of decadence and vulgarity, developing an acidic tongue, going toe to toe with anyone that stands in her way, one of whom happens to be Jeanne Balibar in a cameo appearance, a poet of some repute who writes the words to several songs and may be sleeping with her guy, putting her on notice, aggressively giving her a put-down that’s utterly priceless before walking away, preening like a peacock, openly flirting with other men in front of Wiktor, adding to her erotic allure.  French film director Cédric Kahn also has a cameo appearance, playing a film director named Michel, with Wiktor filling him in on Zula’s rise to fame, exaggerating profusely, making her seem more exotic, like a Polish Josephine Baker, which only makes her hate him more, growing annoyed with him.  With Paris losing its luster, it makes it easier spitting him out of her life as she returns to Poland, more than a little homesick.  Of course, Wiktor aches with regret, lost in the misery of a tortured psyche, becoming a shadow of himself, but willing to follow her to the ends of the earth, which means returning to Poland, no matter the consequences, where he pays heavily for his defection, jailed and having to denounce himself for committing a crime.  Despite the overt expressiveness of the many song and dance routines, this is very much an interior film, one that probes the mind of the artist/creator, who becomes a tragic, wounded soul in pursuit of love, closing the film exactly where it began, in a small, dilapidated church on the side of the road, the place where dreams were born. 

2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida

                  

 

IDA                 A                                                                                                                      Poland  Denmark  (80 mi)  2013  d:  Pawel Pawlikowski

Do you have carnal thoughts?  You should try, otherwise what sort of sacrifice are these vows for you?            —Wanda (Agata Kulesza)

Unlike the literary hallucinations of The Woman in the Fifth (2011), where reality is so absorbed into the consciousness of the imagination where the lines between fact and fiction are blurred and indistinguishable, this eye-opening film harkens back into a different era of filmmaking and is the first film the director has made in his native Poland.  Spectacularly shot in Black and White, mostly by Lukasz Zal (after Ryszard Lenczewski dropped out) in his first feature film, the early 60’s postwar setting in Poland is brilliantly captured, becoming one of the more original Holocaust movies ever made, largely due to how history is so underplayed, where the subject is approached through a highly personalized character study of estranged relatives who don’t entirely like or even trust one another.  Agata Trzebuchowska is Anna, a non-professional spotted with her nose in a book at a Warsaw café (where a photo was sent on a smartphone to the director in Paris for approval), playing a shy teenager raised as an orphan in a convent.  Before she’s allowed to take her vows, however, the Mother Superior instructs her to visit her aunt, her only known relative, even though her aunt refused the church’s request to take Anna out of the orphanage.  The bleak look of the convent in the snow is not a welcoming sight, depicting a harsh rural life of sacrifice and deprivation, beautifully shown by Anna’s beaten up suitcase held together by a belt as she embarks into the world.  The director builds the story visually, using little to no dialogue, and a still photography 4:3 aspect ratio showing a self-contained world captured in the narrow confines of each shot, where the spare imagery adds to the developing mood of understated emotional resonance, as much of the film can be read through Anna’s eyes, a devout religious believer who has had no contact with the outside world, continually wearing her habit, completely unaware of her closeted sensuality, whose innocence exudes a kind of elevated tenderness, where the artful look and design of the film reflects her interior fragility.  Her aunt Wanda, on the other hand, is the polar opposite, a strong and fearless woman with a turbulent past, played by Agata Kulesza, one of the foremost Polish actresses in theater, television, and film, a world weary character in her 40’s, seen dressed in a bathrobe smoking a cigarette while a man in the bedroom is getting dressed when Anna arrives at her door suitcase in hand. 

While Wanda is a heavy drinker and smoker who enjoys the company of men, who’s possessed with a sharp critical tongue used to lashing out at others, it’s a stunning clash of moral values, but also personalities, as Wanda is as sharply direct and to the point as any man, a prosecuting judge known as “Red Wanda” for having prosecuted so many “enemies of the people” for the communist regime during Stalinist purges in Poland.  Wanda is used to comical effect, showing brilliant Kafkaesque wit, yet she’s also brutally honest, instantly cutting through any pretense (“So you’re a Jewish nun?”), where she’s a perfect fit for the dark edgy humor of a Bèla Tarr movie, where the intervention of the church, through Anna, only makes things more absurd.  Anna, it turns out in a startling revelation, was born Ida Lebenstein, a Polish Jew whose father was Jewish, who somehow survived the war by growing up in a Catholic convent, with no memory whatsoever of her family origins, but she’s curious what happened to them.  The two embark on a road movie to uncover a painful piece of history by searching through the rural farmlands outside Warsaw, where the locations are used to stunning effect, as each shot is dwarfed by a mysteriously threatening sky, given almost apocalyptic implications in this personal walk through history, where Wanda cautions Ida before they leave, “What if you go there and discover there is no God?”  Wanda’s character evokes pain and tragedy in every shot, while each shot of Ida reflects the meticulous balance and composition of Vermeer paintings, evoking the near mystical tranquility of Woman with a Water Jug or Girl with a Pearl Earring, where she is benevolent and completely non-judgmental, with both combining to create an incredibly intense effect.  Wanda is surprisingly informative about her childhood recollections, including photographs of Ida’s mother, recalling various childhood incidents, including her sister’s artistic talent in creating her own stained-glass window that she built for a barn when they were living on a farm.  Driving through the empty landscape, they come to a crossroads where they actually pick up a young hitchhiker (Dawid Ogrodnik) who is an alto sax jazz musician playing in the town where they are heading.  His friendly nature is a clue for Wanda to sarcastically advise Ida to lighten up, “You should try carnal love.”  Later that evening, with Wanda already drunk and passed out in bed, Ida wanders downstairs to listen from behind one of the large columns, where the eloquence of the music is hauntingly beautiful, as they’re playing John Coltrane’s “Naima” Naima - John Coltrane - YouTube (4:19).

Joana Kulig is seen briefly as the lead singer of the group, which earlier in the evening was playing more raucous rock ‘n’ roll dance numbers that recall the finale sequences of Buñuel’s classic satires on the Catholic church, VIRIDIANA (1961) or Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto) (1965), where even here the sensuous nature of the music has a way of challenging Ida’s devotion to the church, as she’s hearing something she’s never experienced before, creating an avalanche of doubt that leads her to ponder what life outside of the monastery would be like, suggesting there’s a great deal more in the world to learn about, yet at the same time she’s discovering the crushing truth about her family.  Her parents died under mysterious circumstances, where in the small village of Piaski they visit the farmhouse of the neighboring Polish family that presumably protected Ida’s Jewish family from the Nazi’s during the war, but instead could easily have murdered them in order to gain their property, where at one point Wanda, displaying her prosecutorial bluntness, starts a painful argument with someone who may or may not have actually killed Ida’s parents, where the confrontational tone of belligerence and accusation sends Ida outside into the barn with the farm animals where she sees the stained-glass window.  It’s a haunting moment of quiet existential realization, a momentary crisis of faith, as the unvarnished truth is often too painful to hear.  History and the Holocaust are only a backdrop to this story, where Poland’s complicity is a key component, yet it quietly overshadows everything that takes place with an almost unbearable power.  The economical power of Pawlikowski’s direction is nothing less than superb, as are the musical choices that assume a haunting place in the character’s spiritual development, where early on we hear Wanda playing an old phonograph of the spirited final movement of Mozart’s 41st Symphony “Jupiter” Mozart Sinfonía nº 41 "Jupiter" - VPO Bohm (4 de 4) YouTube (6:26).  Later in the film we hear her listening to the more quietly sublime Andante movement Mozart - Symphony No. 41 in C major, "Jupiter" - II. Andante cantabile (Bohm)  YouTube (7:39), where there’s a beautiful musical transition that occurs between Wanda and Ida, where the music literally binds together their souls, assuming the awesome power of salvation and human forgiveness, where the unbelievable tenderness that is shared defies belief. 

The subtlety of the film speaks volumes as it delicately contrasts the present with the past.  While on the surface it’s a very simple film about good and evil, yet there are multiple layers of underlying examinations, not the least of which is a perceived absence of God in the Jewish extermination, or in the subsequent Stalinist purges, contrasted against a novitiate nun’s interest in experiencing “the world” before she takes her vows, where the music is positively extraordinary, matching the artistic reach of the cinematography, where the "worldly" music of John Coltrane may have never been put to more expressive use.  The film avoids any ounce of pretense or melodrama, but is starkly realistic and purposeful, recalling the extraordinarily spare and spiritually bleak films of Bresson or Dreyer that question the existence of faith, where art transcends the inevitability of human fallibility, suffering, and sorrow throughout time immemorial.  With the inventive use of a haunting visual scheme, creating a profoundly mysterious and tranquil atmosphere, Pawlikowski makes effective use of unbroken silences in unforgettable, underplayed performances, and a simply glorious use of music that touches on the divine, concluding with Alfred Brendel playing a Bach chorale, BRENDEL, J.S.Bach "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ", BWV 639 YouTube (3:32).  There are moments of sublime poetry in this film, and exquisite acting, where the implications at the end are left ambiguous.  At only 80-minutes, Pawlikowski’s approach to conventional material is revelatory, where the film is an homage to Eastern European filmmaking of the 60’s, literally rediscovering a lost art since the break up of the Soviet Union, while at the same time providing an elegiac requiem for all those lost during the war, where the slow pace and long static shots are woven into the fabric of this film, which is itself a slow and arduous journey of discovery into the painful realms of the past.