Tag: Tomasz Kot

Along with film, two subjects that interest me very much are history and music. Both of these subjects have fascinated me in my life in general, as well as when they’ve been the subjects of films I’ve liked. Both subjects are placed front and center in Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski’s follow-up to Ida (my favorite film released in 2014), and if it’s not quite up to the level of that film, it’s still very good.

Co-written by Pawlikowski and Janusz Glowacki (who died before the film was released), the story starts in 1949 Poland, where Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a pianist, and Irena (Agata Kulesza), an ethnomusicologist, are traveling the countryside to find a troupe of performers to preserve and stage the folk music of the country. They’re accompanied by Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), a government official who is nevertheless genuinely moved by what he sees and hears. One of the many performers Wiktor and Irena audition/listen to is Zula (Joanna Kulig), who sings a folk song with Anna (Ania Zagorska), another performer (the song they sing, “Ja Za Woda, Ty Za Woda”, translates as “Beyond the Waters, you and I”), and she immediately captivates Wiktor (when he asks, “What else have you got?”, she replies, “To sing?”). Zula ends up being the star of the show, and she and Wiktor begin a passionate affair, even after she admits she’s there to spy on him. However, Wiktor becomes upset about the Polish government, under instructions from Moscow, ordering the music to be propaganda for the government, so he and Zula plan to meet in Berlin and defect to Paris from there, but Zula never shows. Years later, Wiktor is now living in Paris, making his living as a pianist, when he gets a letter from Zula. They meet in a café, and even though he’s living with Juliette (Jeanne Balibar), a poet, and she’s involved with someone else, Wiktor and Zula continue their affair. Wiktor then goes to Yugoslavia when the troupe (which Zula is still in) is performing there, but it turns out the man Zula is involved with is Kaczmarek, who has Wiktor kicked out of the country. A few years later, Zula makes it back to Paris, and she and Wiktor take up again (even though she’s married; he’s broken things off with Juliette but they’re still friends), but they’re miserable there.

Pawlikowski based this loosely on the story of his parents – his father was a medic, while his mother was an aspiring ballerina, but they had the same kind of tempestuous, on-and-off again affair Viktor and Zula have here (they had the same names as well). He uses music to provide the subtext of the relationship between the two of them. This is a tricky way to tell the story – Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. and Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart also tried this approach, and while they were both fascinating to watch, they weren’t quite able to pull it off – but Pawlikowski is able to bring it off. Part of it is how he grounds the material in real-life details, like the Polish folk music group (based on a real group), or the song “Dwa Serduszka” (which translates as “Two Hearts”), an old Polish folk song, that is performed throughout the movie, including as a jazz standard by Zula in Paris. Pawlikowski also pays attention to the atmosphere of each place, as well as the politics of Poland’s Communist government (when Wiktor wants to go back to visit Zula, everyone makes plain to him how bad an idea that is), and how the bohemian atmosphere of Paris, despite being free of oppression, feels oppressive in its own way to Wiktor and Zula (this was also a major plot point in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and works just as well here). Part of it is the way Pawlikowski, as he did in IDA, working again with cinematographer Lukasz Zal, shoots the film in black-and-white and in the old-fashioned aspect ratio of the time period, which not only fits with that time period, but also the setting. More even so than Ida, the black and white photography is also gorgeous, with the white (the Polish landscape) contrasting with the black (the smoky nightclub Wiktor plays in while in Paris) more than any movie since perhaps Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s.

Mostly, however, it’s the music. Pawlikowski uses a number of Polish songs, and not just the two I mentioned above, but he also uses music from elsewhere. In IDA, jazz was the music of choice even though it was considered decadent by the Soviet Union, but as Paris was the major European city that welcomed jazz, it’s played throughout those sequences, and Pawlikowski serves up some good songs to establish mood and the period, from Zula and Wiktor performing together “I Loves You Porgy” (from Porgy & Bess) to the two dancing to Ira Woods’ performance of the great Louis Jordan song “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” to standards like Billie Holiday’s version of “The Man I Love”. Pawlikowski also throws in “Rock Around the Clock”, which Zula dances to in the nightclub at one point while Wiktor looks on, perhaps to show how things were changing. All of this music expresses the feelings Wiktor and Zula have for each other, even if their conflicting personalities get in the way. The music also provides a counterpoint to the elliptical way Pawlikowski films this movie, from the fadeouts to the dialogue (Zula is rumored to have killed her father; when Wiktor asks her about it, she says, “He mistook me for my mother, until my knife showed him the difference”).

Kulig, who also had a small role in Ida as a singer (before that, she was also in Pawlikowski’s previous film The Woman in the Fifth, which I think is his weakest film to date), completely lights up the screen whenever she appears, and she also sings well. Kot, who Danny Boyle wanted to cast in the upcoming James Bond movie (he left the project when the studio overruled him on that), has the grungy cool of a jazz pianist, but he’s also able to suggest deeper feelings underneath, especially when he and Zula first meet again in Paris and he wants to know why she never showed up (she argues she wasn’t “good enough”). Like IDA, COLD WAR runs less than 90 minutes, and I can understand those who wish it had run longer and been more developed, but what it does show us is a feast for the eyes and the ears.