Cold War is a glowingly beautiful film, its story and direction by Pawel Pawlikowsi and its luminous black-and- white and Academic aspect ratio cinematography by Lukasz Zal. It follows the amor fou of musician Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) from Poland to France and back again, from 1949 to 1964. They start out in Poland putting together a folk dance ensemble, beautiful and successful on its own, until they are told by a Party bureaucrat to make it more about labor and the struggle for world peace, i.e., Stalinist. Wiktor escapes to Paris, as Zula stays in Poland, eventually marrying an Italian and meeting Wiktor in Yugoslavia. Wiktor sticks with jazz as rock 'n roll becomes more popular, while Zula becomes more disillusioned with the increasing political folk dancing and singing. They end up taking pills and sitting next to a single tree on a bench next to a field of wheat, reminding one of DW. Griffith and "the wind blowing through the trees."
Zula struggles for personal freedom while Wiktor seeks artistic freedom; each is unhappy with the compromises one has to make as they repeatedly attempt to reconcile. Pawlikowski's direction is effectively low-key, inspired by the films not only of Robert Bresson but of Roman Polanski's Polish films, where the viewer meets the image halfway and is trusted to understand the often complicated artistic and political complexities of this gorgeous film.
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