Cold War (Award for the Mise en Scene at the last Cannes Festival) tells the troubled and beautiful love story between the composer Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and the singer Zula (Joanna Kulig, former protagonist of the director's previous film, Ida), two artists with a restless personality, between 1949 and 1964, between Warsaw, Paris, Berlin, in a Europe wounded in body and spirit by the world conflict and about to be divided on the first notes of the Cold War. He is a romantic and naive musician with self-injurious tendencies, she is a criminal with a violent past with a certain skill in the art of survival. The two love each other, then they betray each other, they break up, they reunite, they love each other again, they hurt each other in all possible ways, they hate each other, they chase each other, they save each other, they love each other for the umpteenth and last time, in a journey through history and music of a period of fear, painful compromises and a lot of passion.
Pawel Pawlikowski, Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2015 for the beautiful going, returns to recount the years of post-war communism in rigorous black and white, a symbol of the coldness of the regime and the grayness of everyday life in a 4: 3 format peeping tom style, spying through the windows of the cinema a burning love story and disastrous, freely inspired by the story of his parents, in whose memory the film is inspired and described by the Polish director as “the most interesting characters I have ever met, both free and flamboyant, as a couple an endless disaster”.
Cold War is an atypical film, a love film with an ancient flavor that seems to refer to Aurora's Murnau (1927), where the phases of a destructive and wonderful passion are told as they were told to the director himself by his parents, between pursuits, violence, betrayals in the Poland of compromise first, in the decadent Paris then and finally again (in the terrible final notes) in the homeland. All in episodes from photo-novels, obsolete but functional, which contain the entirety of an era and, at the same time, an incredible private and personal story interpreted with depth by the two beautiful protagonists.
Co-star of the film the musical aspect, superbly constructed by composer Marcin Masecki, key collaborator of the director, who skillfully builds a soundtrack that also has identity and spatial value: from the popular music at the beginning of the film, to the propaganda songs of a Poland enslaved to the power of Stalin, up to the smoky jazz of Paris at the time, decadent and magnificent, but also powerful and unsettling silences, the motif of a love story destined to self-destruction.
A little love story, a little political film, a little musical, Cold War is a precious and unmissable film halfway between new authorship and references to the great cinema of the past.
