Paweł Pawlikowski’s compact romance earns its sorrow through Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot and the music. We recommend it, with one reservation: the gaps between scenes sometimes leave the lovers’ feelings harder to follow than they should be.
Cold War is a fine romance with two persuasive leads and an occasional habit of cutting away before we have felt enough. Paweł Pawlikowski gives their relationship 88 minutes, with little patience for the explanations and reconciliations that usually fill a love story. He wants us to recognise the attraction before we have decided whether these people ought to be together. For most of the film, we do.
The screenplay, credited to Janusz Głowacki and Paweł Pawlikowski, follows the lovers through postwar Europe, where politics makes being together difficult without explaining everything that goes wrong. These are people capable of making difficulties for themselves, which saves the film from becoming an illustrated complaint about borders. Their volatility gives the actors something more interesting to play than wounded innocence. The pressure of the state is felt, but the couple cannot blame it for every hurt.
Joanna Kulig plays Zuzanna ‘Zula’ Lichoń with enough impatience and appetite to disturb the careful compositions around her. Tomasz Kot gives Wiktor Warski a persistent longing that makes her restlessness harder to watch. We were moved by him; he makes wanting this woman seem an exhausting, permanent condition. Their differences make the attraction persuasive, and neither actor asks us to approve of the couple’s behaviour before taking their feelings seriously.
Łukasz Żal’s black-and-white photography uses the narrow Academy frame to keep our attention on the people rather than the scale of the journey. The precision is a pleasure in itself, though it sometimes makes suffering look a little too carefully arranged. Production designers Marcel Sławiński and Katarzyna Sobańska give the period settings enough detail to make the places feel inhabited. That helps in a film which gives us so little time to get our bearings before moving on.
Music does a good deal of the storytelling, with folk material and jazz giving the relationship different sounds as it develops. The changing songs help us register shifts that the abbreviated scenes cannot always explain. We listen for what has changed in the lovers as well as in the music, and that makes the soundtrack more involving than a collection of tasteful choices. In a romance so reluctant to spell things out, it is welcome to have something we can follow by ear.
Jarosław Kamiński’s editing is responsible for much of that brevity, moving between episodes and leaving years for us to supply. Usually the gaps sharpen our attention, because a changed mood carries more weight when we have not watched every step towards it. Sometimes, though, we need one of those missing steps: the film asks us to accept the force of an attachment it has hurried past. We would have welcomed a little more time with the couple, even at the expense of such an admirably short running time.
Romantic dramas can wear us down by explaining every change of heart; this one trusts a look or a song to do the work. That trust is mostly justified by the performers, even when the jump to the next episode comes too soon. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and do not expect these lovers to reward the attention by behaving sensibly.
