Cold War

Watching this is like reading a Junichiro Tanizaki short story: you’re enthralled by all the ways that love can blossom into something toxic and obsessive. After all, we are witnessing a couple break up then crash back into each other’s lives repeatedly over a fifteen year span. It’s a slim narrative but one propelled by a lean, mean artistic minimalism that crafts some sublime, transcendent moments of love and lust careening towards the edge of destruction.

Don’t get Cold War’s title twisted as a statement on the encroachment of sociopolitical forces on the couple’s lives. They’re present in the background but not meaningfully engaged or explored. There’s not much emotional depth here, so Cold War is powered through by the driving forces of its beautiful, haunting images and its lead actress’ dynamic work.

The images carry an emotive power that the story’s fatalism and flirtations with oblivion may otherwise lack. It isn’t just that Zula and Wiktor are thunderstruck from their first meeting, but in the ways that they animalistically caress and devour each other. It’s in the way that watching Zula listen to “Rock Around the Clock” and carnally dance towards the edge of madness and self-destruction in front of an entire club says more about her displaced point-of-view than anything else. While Wiktor welcomes the modernity of Paris and changing times as an excuse to shed the oppressiveness of Polish society, Zula is continually ahead of the curve in her libertine morality and ferocious physicality. If only we had spent more time with her and less with Wiktor’s dyspeptic looking composer.

It’s engrossing to watch two people barrel into each other and disrupt everything around them for the sake of love, or something like it. It’s downright shocking to learn that director Pawel Pawlikowski intended this as a tribute to his parents love affair. How he managed to make this perpetual implosion look and feel like beautifully reoccurring rendezvous is impressive. What exactly drives them to and from each other isn’t always clear, but there’s still a richness here that is overpowering.