As I settled into my seat in screen 3 of Dublin’s IFI, a screen befitting a review, its diminutive size more akin to a preview than the auditoriums one is more accustomed to, it occurred to me that Cold War is not just another foreign language film. Not in Ireland.
Since its accession to the EU in 2006, Poland, much like Ireland in the preceding decades, has cited its people as its greatest export. That first year saw circa 95,000 applications from Polish immigrants to work in Ireland alone. In all walks of life, in virtually all economic sectors and in offices throughout the country, for most of us (especially in Dublin), Poles are our colleagues and friends. So it was with heightened anticipation that I greeted this dimming of lights.
Cold War begins shortly after World War II has ended, in 1949. We join Wiktor (the W sounds like a V in Polish) and Irena, who, like Alan Lomax earlier in the Mississippi Delta, who recorded the great Blues musicians of the time, set out do the same for Polish folk songs.
We are serenaded in an opening montage by earnest singers whose tunes are steeped, as in most folk traditions, in simple stories of the poor: tales of hardship, honest work and love. Folk standards such as these were often not written down, and in the renditions captured on film there is the vitality that comes – along with a general knowing that their existence is ephemeral, lasting only in the performance – with a new understanding: that there also exists, in this moment, for this interpretation to be definitive. And so as Wiktor and Irena travel around Poland – not merely recording as documenting and defining – this new possibility heightens their poignancy.
The plot itself, like these songs (my introduction to Polish folk ballads), meanders in tone from the solemn to the celebratory. Some melodies are immediately familiar to my western ear whilst others one might term growers.
This is a story of contrasts. The monotonic black and white movie about life behind the iron curtain filmed in the standard ratio of the red carpet is but one. The starkest contrast of all, though, is that between the protagonists of our central love story, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), the dark-haired, mercurial composer and arranger, and Zula (Joanna Kulig), the blonde peasant singer auditioning and hoping to find, if not stardom, then some colour amidst the grey of post-war Poland.
On face of it Wiktor is the stoical traditionalist whilst Zula is presented to us as what one might term a post-war version of the manic pixie dream girl. But this turns out to be misleading. Wiktor yearns to be free of the old world he has known and break into widescreen and technicolor, whilst Zula wrestles with his (and later her own) burgeoning “bourgeois” identity.
There is also irony is this film, as evidenced during casting, by Wiktor who remarks of Zula, that she has something “unique” about her. Later in the film, the company’s administrative leader, a sort of mid-ranking civil servant, Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), remarks to Wiktor of one of their company that they should remove her as she has too much of a “Slav” look about her. He then realises that perhaps he is “over-reacting” and suggests merely dying her hair blonde instead. It is Kaczmarek, too, who happily cedes to a government request, which in the eyes of Wiktor and Irena, politically contaminates their now smash-hit artistic endeavour, by utilising its success to further promote communism and Stalin throughout the great cities of Eastern Europe.
The continuing success of their roving company takes them further afield, eventually to Berlin, where finally Wiktor sees his opportunity to be free. As he crosses the then fluid checkpoint, alone, having spent the day waiting for Zula in leaving their life behind for the west it would be too easy to see Zula’s actions as a betrayal. Though later they are reunited in Paris, they struggle to find themselves, and Zula accuses Wiktor of discarding his identity, drunkenly but sweetly she trails-off, “you are different here.”
It’s also too easy to see their story as a tale of can’t live with … can’t live without … For these lovers are forced to make weighty choices, the impact of WWII on their country, particularly on national identity, left Poland a far less individualistic nation than the US or UK in the traumatic post-war period. The pull of sovereignty and the protections to their borders offered by Stalinism are not mere tools of control for the Polish communist state but can also be seen as a more natural retrenchment after the suffering of occupation.
Zula’s return to Poland and ultimate “rejection” of the west cannot therefore be read merely as devotion to the ideals of pastoral nationalism. Both characters, though perhaps not as significant an act in Zula’s case, are defiant. For Zula her defiance is more personal: religion is forbidden under the regime of the time.
Even apart from these immense considerations the Poland that Zula yearns for is diametrically different from Paris of the 1950s and 1960s. Here, director Pawel Pawlikowski, uses two contrasts to illustrate this, music and landscape. The music of Wiktor in Paris is jazz, gone are the traditional foot-tapping rhythms of home. Now we see him hunched over the piano, and in one scene, with eyes closed and thinking only of Zula his lover now departed, we see a physicality to his musicianship in opposition to the inscrutable conductor we saw in Poland. In Pawlikowski’s world Poland is shown to us almost exclusively as a rural landscape contrasted starkly with the lights of Paris.
Cold War is a beautiful film. It would a beautiful film with the sound down. And it would be a beautiful film with your eyes closed. That these elements are married in a way that Zula and Wiktor never could be amounts to the best hour and a half I have spent in the cinema in quite some time.
A Room With No View 