Cold War

In an interview transcribed around the time of his work with The Band, Bob Dylan talked about the folk music made in "the old weird America", recalling songs about people turned to swans, suitors throwing their girlfriends into rivers to murder them, and lovers from whose graves sprouted entwined roses.  On the evidence of Pawel Pawlitkowski's Cold War (2018), there was an "old weird Poland" as well, characterized by folk songs that sound like ragged, atonal Blues with similarly morose lyrics.  This kind of music informs the opening scenes in Cold War -- Wiktor, a pianist, travels through a wintry and desolate rural Poland collecting folk songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.  With Wiktor is an older woman who seems to be his lover -- we sense this from the way that they casually share cigarettes -- and an apparatchik, a chubby and unprepossessing man named Kramczarek. Far from any towns, Wiktor discovers a ruined church, it's dome an open oculus to the sky -- the church stands in a barren woods and is like an apparition from a Tarkovsky film.  God's eyes are all that remains of a painted fresco -- these huge glaring eyes remind us that we are watching a movie from a perspective that neither of movie's hapless protagonists can achieve.  The folk song collectors end up at a damaged country estate where they audition young people for Mazurek, a folk song and dance company.  During these auditions, Wiktor encounters Zula, a beautiful young girl -- she's not well-prepared for her audition presumably intending to deploy her sex appeal to win a spot in the troupe.  She sings the obligatory folk song with another girl, but, then, performs a show-tune from a Russian musical, the song "Two Hearts" that will reoccur as a leit motif in the film. (Polish-speaking critics note that she sings the song in Russian, poor form for a company that intends to specialize in Polish folk music.)  Wiktor falls in love with Zula during training and rehearsals -- he plays piano for the company.  Zula is the toughest of tough cookies -- she is reputed to have murdered her own father, although she blithely tells Wiktor that "he mistook me for my mother and so I taught him the difference with a knife", noting that the man is still alive, although, perhaps, not in one piece.  Zula also blithely advises Wiktor that she is "ratting on him" to Kramczarek, the Communist party man, although not telling him anything too harmful.  When Wiktor walks away from her disgusted, she throws herself  into the river and like Millais "Orphelia" drifts placidly downstream -- at this point, the audience grasps that Zula is something like the woman played by Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, casually lethal and inescapably seductive as well as half-crazy and, indeed, the film looks a great deal like Truffaut's classic, shot in lustrous black and white in the old Academy ratio (4:3).  Mazurek goes on the road and, after some successes, suffers cultural (mis)appropriation by the Stalinist regime -- the music becomes politically inflected and, in Warsaw, the troupe performs under a huge banner showing the handsome and benevolent Papa Stalin.  The woman who accompanied Wiktor during his forays into collecting folk songs protests, Wiktor doesn't support her, and she seems to be purged -- Wiktor seems weak and ineffectual.  In Berlin, he persuads Zula to defect with him -- but she gets drunk instead, apparently too profoundly Polish to leave the Eastern Bloc.  Wiktor goes to Paris and joins a jazz ensemble playing in a club called L'Eclipse.  he travels to Croatia to see Zula perform -- she's now the featured star in Mazurek.  Apparently, the Communist officials are afraid that he will persuade her to defect and, so, they politely escort him to a bus at intermission and sent him back to Paris via Zagreb.  Years pass -- titles inform us that the movie takes place between 1949 and 1959.  While Wiktor is recording spooky music for a murder scene in a movie, Zula shows up.  She's now married to a Sicilian and has used her husband to secure a visa to Paris.  Zula and Wiktor have sex and, once again, become lovers.  (She sings "Two Hearts" in a jazz version, sounding a little like a female Chet Baker, in Eclipse with Wiktor's ensemble.)  Wiktor wants her to become a recording artist and encourages her to seduce a smarmy producer named Michel -- he has told everyone that she danced for Stalin and murdered her own father:  these exotic details, he tells her, will enhance sales on her records.  Zula despises Paris and is jealous of Wiktor's previous love affair with a poetess and she has a brief sexual encounter with Michel, more or less as Wiktor has proposed.  The lovers violently quarrel and Zula disappears.  When Wiktor confronts Michel, who is now with another young girl, he learns Zula has gone back to Poland.  Wiktor is disconsolate and, despite warnings about what will happen to him by an official at the Polish embassy, he crosses the border to Poland.  In his home country, Wiktor ends up in a labor camp and, apparently, has the fingers on his right hand cut off during torture.  Zula bribes her way into the camp and vows to save him.  She marries Kramczarek and even has a child with him as a bribe to secure Wiktor's release.  We next see her dressed up in a ridiculous costume, her breasts mostly exposed, performing some sort of bizarre tribute to Cuban and Latin American music -- it's some sort of cultural exchange cooked-up by the Communist party.  At a concert, Zula gets so drunk that she almost falls off the stage -- she and Wiktor finish a bottle of vodka in the toilet.  Then, they escape together into the countryside to the ruined church from the opening scenes, a location that represents the doomed Slavic destiny of the Poles.  Zula pronounces them married and they take an overdose of pills.  Waiting for death, on a bench near the road, Zula, gets restless, and says "Let's cross over to the other side.  The view is better there."  They get up from their bench, exit the screen, and, then, after a beat, the wind rustles through the wheat field to signify their passing.

Although this plot summary suggests that the film is a bit sordid, in fact, Pawlitkowski shows perfectly good taste -- his movie is a brilliant piece of art and he elides the vicious stuff, leaving the viewer to imagine what has occurred between brief tableaux-like scenes:  we don't see the love affairs with other people or the torture or any of the squalid betrayals:  all of this occurs off-screen in the intervals between sequences, marked by long black pauses.   The director emphasizes the musical performances and dancing -- in effect, the film is a kind of darkly despairing musical; the picture's grand passions and the theme of love unto, and, perhaps, surpassing, death make the film seem rather operatic.  Indeed, the music imparts a sort of distance to the material.  In a scene in L'Eclipse, the band plays Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock" and Zula dances ecstatically, climbing up onto the bar to kick her legs in the air after whirling around with one man after another.  She is a force of nature and we can see that poor Wiktor is inadequate, too much older and without her exuberance, and, yet, he believes that she is "the woman of (his) life", an emotion that she reciprocates even when she is in the arms of another man.  The couple is miserable when living together and miserable when apart.  Pawlitkowsky was inspired to make this movie by the example of his parents, a couple whose turbulent relationship resulted in them living apart mostly married to other people, although in their old age, sick and dying, they reunited in Berlin where they committed suicide together.  (Pawlitkowsky was 31 at the time.)  The Cold War, of course, refers to both the political conflict that separates the lovers physically as well as to their violent and destructive relationship.  At one point in the film, Zula insults the French poetess with whom Wiktor lived before she emigrated to Paris -- she mocks the notion of "metaphor".  But the film is beautifully constructed, devising visual metaphors or symbols, for its themes.  Ruined, devastated Poland is symbolized by the smashed Orthodox church.  Wiktor's aspirations as a Bohemian are demonstrated by the starving artist's garret that he inhabits in Paris -- city also symbolized by a tracking shot showing a statue in looming overhead in front of the Louvre.  The ridiculously decollete costume that Zula wears in the Latin rhumba number is a metaphor for the degradation that she has experienced in prostrating herself before the cold, serpentine Kramczarek to save Wiktor.  (In this scene, the actress playing Zula is willing to look sloppy and fat to further make this point.)  Even the final scene, with Zula's remark that "the view will be better (from the other side)" seems metaphoric for the many border crossings that the picture depicts.  Viewed in a certain cynical light, the film might arguably be said to be about alcoholism -- we see Zula chugging shots of vodka at a Parisian party and, then, stealing the bottle to get drunk in the toilet.  But Pawlitkowsky's use of music and the exquisite beauty of the film's compositions give the picture a transcendent lyricism that redeems the sordid aspects of the narrative.  Even the movie's music after the final scene seems perfectly considered:  We hear Glenn Gould playing one of Bach's Goldberg variations -- the precise almost mathematical clarity of the piano playing is accompanied by Gould's spooky, half-whispered crooning:  an abstract musical theorem is interwoven with an anguished human voice.  Pawlitkowsky is a Pole who has lived most of his life in England where he has made many highly regarded films (the BFI is one principal producer for this movie) -- his previous film, Ida, about a supremely religious young woman, a novice nun, who discovers that she is, in fact, the daughter of murdered Jews was also a dire and brilliant picture (it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture).  This movie, less than 90 minutes long, is both brilliant and heart-breaking.  The acting of the two lovers played Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig, who performs like s Slavic Marilyn Monroe, is beyond reproach