Love Is A Problem That Cannot Be Solved: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War

Pawel Pawlikowski became an instant critical favourite with 2013’s crystalline, beautiful Ida, about a novitiate nun in 1960s Poland about to take her vows, whose discovery of a family secret provided a window into her country’s dark heart.

His follow-up, Cold War, dedicated to Pawlikowski’s parents, is not explicitly religious in the same way. Set in Poland, just as the World War shifts into the Cold one, the film’s first and only strikingly denominational image is the bombed-out dome roof of a church. Most of the story takes place on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in nightclub spaces of cosmopolitan enlightenment.

But the devotional impulse isn’t far off. The anguished, ecstatic romance of Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) seems guided by the pull of mystery, by secret, immutable laws of heart and nation. By providence.

Wiktor and two colleagues are touring the muddy Polish countryside, recording peasant songs of earth, poverty and broken hearts. At a state home, still damaged from the war, they build and train a travelling company of singers and dancers, with the aim of reclaiming Polish dignity, of broadcasting the beautiful sounds of a devastated people. One of the performers, the spirited, glamourous, younger Zula, catches Wiktor’s eye, and a clandestine romance blooms.

While the two unlikely lovers become more enmeshed, the successful company catches the eye of the Soviet authorities, who insist on songs about the Proletariat and the Great Leader. In one of a series stunning formal arrangements — Pawlikowski films in still, boxed frames, which gives everything the formality of recollection — portraits of Stalin and Lenin loom over the stage show. Not for the only time in the film, pure intentions are subject to interference and compromise.

When the company is sent to Berlin, still divided between Axis and Soviet powers, Wiktor proposes a daring bolt into Western territory. He waits until dark, but Zula, unsure and unable, stays at the reception, shot through with misery. He leaves, initiating a string of separations and reunions borrowed from the epics.

Cold War is a love story about love as the only story.

The film jolts forward in time and place — Poland,Paris, Yugoslavia, Paris again, Poland again — as the lovers fall in and out of eachother’s grasp. We find Wiktor in the French capital, making a living as a composer and musician in the city’s clubs. He sits at the edge of the bar until closing time, one eye on the door. He’s probably kept this routine up every night since he last saw Zula. “Whoever you’re waiting for, she isn’t coming,” says the bartender, but the hinges creak and — my word! — there she is.

Zula is miserable without her love and, eventually, miserable with him. The unshackled energies of post-war France give her everything: music, cafes, restaurants and parties with artists. A shot of her and Wiktor in their flat is the picture of bohemian satisfaction: him lying on the floor, marking up music sheets, her in a chair, bent over lyrics for her record. But she’s jealous about an ex-girlfriend, and they bicker. In nightclubs she throws the drink down her and dances to the furious new beats of American rock’n’ roll.

Their abandoned home country exerts an irrational, unexplainable pull. The music of their lost troupe is threaded through the movie, a sort of subconscious siren song.

The administrative manager of the company described traditional Polish music as “songs of pain and humiliation” and this description applies to the experience of love itself. The film’s cycles of freedom and servitude, escape and imprisonment, disturb straightforward Western framing of fuzzy feelings as a means of liberation. Swooning and pristine, Cold War is one of the most romantic and cynical films of the year, at the same time.

Here, love is a problem that cannot be solved. At least in this life.

Cold War is finished its limited cinema run but will be available in other formats later in the year.