Paweł Pawlikowski gives actors and music much of the work in his spare love stories. We admire his restraint, though he sometimes leaves out the scenes that would make his lovers’ feelings clearer.
Fi1m perspective
In Cold War (2018), Paweł Pawlikowski leaves little space for explanations or reconciliations. He gives the lovers 88 minutes and expects us to recognise their attraction before deciding whether they ought to be together. Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot make that a reasonable request, giving us enough to care about while leaving plenty to question. We were moved by their performances because they make the attraction convincing without making either person blameless. Pawlikowski’s willingness to let his lovers cause their own difficulties gives the actors something worth playing.
He came to features through British television documentaries, making the socially observant Last Resort (2000) and the youthful romance My Summer of Love (2004). The Woman in the Fifth (2011) came before the turn to Polish productions with Ida (2013) and Cold War. Ida was his first Polish-language film, bringing Polish subjects and black-and-white photography to the centre of his work. Love, exile and identity recur through this career. We are interested in how much he can leave out before the people become hard to understand.
His collaborators include cinematographer Łukasz Żal, and his restrained camera gives us time to watch people rather than simply following their movements. The precise black-and-white compositions suggest a remembered past. In Cold War, music earns its place alongside the two leads as a reason the romance works. Folk and jazz help express feelings that the gaps between scenes leave unstated, though music cannot account for every change of heart.
The screenplay for Cold War, credited to Janusz Głowacki and Pawlikowski, gives the lovers difficulties that cannot all be blamed on their circumstances in postwar Europe. That keeps them interesting, but the cutting sometimes leaves us less certain about what they feel than we should be. We occasionally need another scene with them before he moves on. Start with Cold War for Kulig, Kot and the music; allow for a few conversations Pawlikowski has decided we can do without.
Biography
Paweł Pawlikowski is a Polish filmmaker. Born in Warsaw in 1957, he left Poland at the age of 14 and later studied literature and philosophy at the University of Oxford. He began his career making documentaries for British television in the 1980s and 1990s.
His feature films include Last Resort (2000), My Summer of Love (2005), Ida (2013), which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and Cold War (2018), for which he received the Best Director prize at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. He directed, co-wrote and co-edited Fatherland (2026), which also premiered at Cannes.
