THEY are crude songs, raw melodies. They sing of a simple love and a simple life. They sing of marriages and a beloved. Taken in tight shots, the faces of the singers are unwelcoming even as the melodies coming from their playing draw us in. Then the singers are now on makeshift stage, amid public rituals like marriage. They continue singing.
The next frames introduce us to the go-betweens: a man and a woman deep into field work. They are recording folk songs about life, love and death in rural Poland, in territories far from the rising ideologies of communism.
They comb the woods and villages, stopping where the singers of the songs are, as if listening to them in the homes of the music where the notes are stringed, where the rhythms are rooted in.
It is deep winter in communist Poland. It is the late-1940s and the ideologies of communism have not yet seeped into distant territories. Two researchers are tasked to record these folk songs, perhaps to find in them the identities of a nation that have been elusive through years and centuries of occupation by other empires, and through shifts in boundaries common to landlocked countries.
What power and exotic appeal do these songs contain? The driver of the truck ferrying the two researchers through the cold landscape seems to know something. The two music experts are interested in their beauty. They are in it for passion.
As the truck rumbles on, the story of what seems like a staid tale of discovery promises no love and no thrill. There is, however, the chill and the dreariness of the cold season caught in the black-and-white poetry of the cinematography, in frame after frame of loveliness and loneliness. It is not even the sadness brought on with the tracks of human feet and presence; it is that gentle but persistent attraction to pulchritude, almost of pathological source, most seductive and alluring, and infinitely fraught with danger.
The two researchers find themselves part of a plan. They are to set up a folkloric group of singers and dancers. That is accomplished. The group performs and is well-received.
But the government has something else in mind—the group has to sing about peace, and land reform and many other things the Communist Party wants to communicate to the people. If the film Cold War stayed with this theme about artists for art and artists for the nation, you would not have been reading this review.
But the filmmakers have something else in mind.
The conflict is not in communism vis-à-vis the culture fettered by capitalism or liberal traditions. The conflict is in that most complex seat of ideologies—the human heart.
The other part of the research team, the man who c0nducts the orchestra, has a liaison with one of the performers. She is this young girl with the charm of a farm girl, with that “raw” and uncultured voice beloved by cultural workers of all persuasions. For the man, she has a tenderness.
She has also a past: she was jailed for some years because she attempted to kill her own father. The reason: to show her father his failure with the knife he tried to use against his wife, her own mother.
The man asks the young girl to run with her to the “free” world. But as with this kind of love, the escape is never perfected.
The screen turns black. The music changes. Jazz comes in and “Poland” disappears. It is Paris and the musician now plays the piano in a trio.
As with this kind of love, the lovers, against stars that cross the sky path of their devotion, meet again. The girl, however, is still with the troupe.
But they find a way to meet again. The girl has left Poland.
The screen darkens. When the lights come back, the Polish woman is an exotic jazz singer. The man is at the piano and when the music plays on, it is the folk ballad about eyes that cry and those eyes that never meet again. The folk song drawn one wintry day in some unknown Polish town is now a torch song. The girl sizzles. Her dress is cosmopolitan. She is a new woman. She is not some rural lass aimed to construct the dreams of ideologues; she has become this sultry singer. Whatever stories about that folk song is now gone. The song is packaged for the new turmoil, for the passion that conjures the breaking of hearts.
In their frenzied lovemaking and in the days they spend as a couple, the woman tells the man he has changed. The world has changed because they have changed. The song has changed because their world has changed.
Cold War uses only the trope of that political period but it does not share the boring premises of politicians, nor does it promise to be a p0litical film in the ponderous sense of the form. What the film has is the celebration of human agency and how when one is free and freed can there be real love. But this real love, this emotion unbridled and going wild does not use the template of the happy ever after.
As with real love, the burden of loving is not in the context nor in the society, but in the two beings in love. They realize that for love to be love is to pursue it to its end, which is the vow to stay forever. Nothing more. Nothing less.
In the last minutes of the film, the woman and the man travel on a bus. The film is in its beginning. They go into the ruins of what turns out be a church. We have entered this earlier, during the trips with the researcher. The wall bears the faded fresco of Christ, with the eyes almost gone but still apparent. They go to the front of the altar and recite the vows to stay together. Then they are back outside, on a bench, beneath a solitary tree. The world is theirs. They wait and when they feel the time is near, the woman asks the man to cross and go where the view is better.
On screen is a landscape that has become beautiful because it is bereft of human presence. It is an allure that lingers because we know a man and a woman were there. The vanishing point of all feelings is there guiding us to understand the narrative about love and kinship that have traveled through sociological paths and times. Politics is there but the story is never grounded in historicity. Old-fashioned as this may be, the story of the man and the woman transcends all the pains that infidelity, notions of art and limited sensualities can cause. In the end, it is not really nihilism or tragedy but that consuming passion—the hunger for a person and the body—for each other that explains the seduction of leaving a geography—or of life—in exchange for what lovers feel is the closest they could approximate eternity.
As the two lovers, Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot as Zula and Wiktor, respectively, grace the screen with faces and bodies that go through shifts without the need for prosthetics. They seem to transform the period with their own presence. The cinematography of Lukasz Zal could be the reason for this artifice that is not artificial. Every frame with its images seizes us not so much with the movement but with the stillness; each confrontation and violent gesture stay with us for the silences they fill each pause and each glance.
Those contradictions distinguish this film whose heat is coddled in its title about the Cold War.
Cold War (Zimna wojna) is directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, who is credited with Janusz Glowacki and Piotr Borkowski for the screenplay. The film competed in the 2018 Cannes Film Festival where it competed for the Palme D’Or and won for Pawlikowski the Best Director prize. The film is distributed by Kino Swiat (Poland), Diaphana Films (France) and Curzon Artificial Eye (United Kingdom). It is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director and Best Cinematography in the 91st Academy Awards.