"Don't despair Zula. Whatever will be, will be."
I don’t want to cast an entire genre in a certain light as
if there is anything inherently bad about it, especially since that is an
abysmal way to go about experiencing movies. But historical romantic epics rarely
interest me on a transcendent level. Again I must stress I do not hold any
internal bias against them, but I do have a certain scepticism to a film
setting a sweeping romance story that will inevitably end either tragically or
sentimentally that ultimately seems to have been placed in a certain historical
setting for purely aesthetic reasons. It’s just me personal taste.
Set against the backdrop of Europe in the 1950s, as the
continent is gripped by the cold war, a musical director named Wiktor Warski
(Tomasz Kot) is set the task of assembling a music troupe to boost the Soviet
regime’s artistic credibility whilst also furthering the propaganda machine.
One of the troupe members is Zuzanna Lichon (Joanna Kulig), a young singer.
Their bond with each other is set to grow and change due to both personal and
highly political reasons.
Perhaps what irks me about historical romantic epics is
their obsessiveness with details, or rather an obsession with the wrong
details. The most lavish attention is given to the most surface level details
when it comes to the setting, and the characters themselves risk feeling just
as decorative as the props. In ‘Cold War’ writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski avoids
that tendency by crafting a film that is light on details and heavy on emotion.
You do not feel the historical setting of ‘Cold War’ through an indulgence of
costumes or architecture, but through the oppressive atmosphere the movie
creates. Every show makes the characters feel small within the frame, mirroring
their own insignificance in the face of this wider global struggle.
However that is not to say ‘Cold War’ is without its
technical complexities. The framing is constrictive and almost claustrophobic
in how it shrinks the characters, but at the same time every shot has a sense
of depth to it for how Pawlikowski chooses to stage it. He uses reflections and
distortions to experiment with the staging of shots and visually stimulate the
audience through nothing more than a flourish of character placement. There are
single frames within this film that carry more visual complexity than the
entire span of other films from this year.
Just as the imagery of Pawlikowski’s film features a
contradiction of terms in how it is simultaneously sparse on details whilst
being richly complex, so does the narrative. In broad terms the plot concerns
two people falling in and out of love with each other over the course of a decade,
and several details of that story seem to be deliberately omitted. ‘Cold War’
does not present the viewer with a coherent love story that can be traced
through every cognitive action. It instead becomes concerned with the broader
emotional weight of how their relationship develops. One could accuse the film
of being overly distant or frustratingly abstract, but by neglecting the story
beats that would function as dramatic high points in most other movies, ‘Cold
War’ paints a much more striking and intimate portrait.
In many ways the film functions as a memory would. The
specific details of why these people are brought together ultimately become
irrelevant next to the greater emotional weight of their relationship. The
circumstances that bring them together or tear them apart are not worth
conveying as far as Pawlikowski is concerned. What matters are the visceral and
passionate beats felt by the characters when they are together or apart. It
means as an audience member you are acutely aware of the distance between them,
or the intimacy of their unison.
None of this is to say that ‘Cold War’ is not also concerned
with the relevancy of its own social context. One could read the lack of
detailed identities given to the main characters as a statement on the ways
people living under the oppressive regimes of mid-20th century
eastern Europe had to hide their own identities. One could comment on the film’s
bleak monochromatic tone and repressive atmosphere. You could even point to the
background observations the film makes regarding the music Wiktor and Zuzanna
changes over time. From traditional communist anthems to the freestyle jazz and
pop music that seeps in, Pawlikowski never misses a chance to evoke an emotional
response through nothing more than a music cue.
But for a film that uses music so effectively to convey a
story, ‘Cold War’ is just as remarkable for how it uses silence. It is content
to revel in the quiet moments that define this relationship, moments that seem
beyond language. It lets the collective emotional weight of the narrative speak
for itself, trusting its lead actors to convey the details of the characters
emotional state through the subtlest of expressions.
I worry that this review will be little more than a series
of contradictory sentiments. I have praised ‘Cold War’ for being both sweeping
and detailed, intimate yet sparse, simple yet complex. None of this even speaks
to how beautifully structured the movie is so as to allow these seemingly
unconnected scenes to build upon one another, whilst traversing years in such a
way that never leaves the audience lost in where the characters are at in their
relationship. At the risk of adding another contradiction to this review, I was
both surprised and validated to hear that the film was based loosely on Pawlikowski’s
own parents. It is a story that feels as personal as cinema can be, whilst also
remaining utterly ageless.
With such confident command of his craft, ‘Pawlikowski’s
romantic epic is one whose narration and narrative work in perfect tandem to
tell an intimate and thematically rich story.
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