Butler's Cinema Scene

Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot

“COLD WAR” My rating: A-

88 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“She’s got something,” observes a Parisian roue after taking in an eyeful and earful of Zula, the troubled heroine of “Cold War.”

No kidding.  As portrayed by Joanna Kulig, Zula radiates slow-smoldering eroticism and more than a hint of working-class voluptuousness. It’s easy to understand how a man — even a sophisticated one — could endure a long search through time and space to be with her.

“Cold War” — an Oscar nominee for foreign language film, director and cinematography — comes to us from Pawel Pawlikowski, who a couple of years back delivered the Academy Award-winning foreign film “Ida,”  about a young nun who discovers she is the child of Holocaust victims.

Like that earlier masterpiece, “Cold War” unfolds during Poland’s decades as a Soviet satellite state and has been shot in mind-blowingly beautiful black and white.

Pawlikowski’s subject is a passionate love affair played out against  the political and social fluctuations of life on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Reportedly he was inspired by the story of his own parents, who maintained an on-and-off relationship for more than 40 years.

Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is a musical scholar traveling post-war Poland to  record rural folk songs.  That obsession leads to a job as artistic director of a state-sponsored school devoted to the preservation of traditional Polish culture. Hordes of desperate young people audition for the program; among them is Zula (Kulig), who initially doesn’t stand out against all the other healthy blondes hoping for a spot.

But Zula is clever and manipulative; she immediate gloms onto a girl with a terrific voice and suggests they sing a duet. The other girl’s talent will mask Zula’s limited abilities while giving Zula’s impressive “it” factor a chance to kick in.

Indeed, before long Zula is one of the company’s featured performers. There are better singers and dancers,  but none can match Zula’s understated yet always-ready sexuality. She even comes with a  back story about having done time for murdering the father who molested her.

In no time at all Zula is sleeping with Wiktor, who is twice her age and earning a national reputation for his beautifully-staged concerts of traditional song and dance.  But the purist in him rebels when the authorities demand that the troupe perform newly-penned songs about land reform against a gigantic portrait of Josef Stalin; he lays a plan to defect with Zula  on a tour stop in East Berlin.

When Zula fails to show up for their rendezvous at a checkpoint between East and West Berlin (this is a decade before the construction of the notorious wall) a disappointed Wiktor goes it alone.

But the paths of these two star-crossed lovers will intersect repeatedly over the years.

Much of the film’s second half unfolds in Paris, where Wiktor tickles the ivories with a jazz band and  composes movie scores. Then, after a decade, Zula shows up. She says she is married to a Sardinian (we never see him) who provides her with dual citizenship and the freedom to leave Poland without consequences.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Victor announces; soon they’re up to their flushed ears in passion. Zula begins singing torch songs in front of Victor’s quartet; they record an album featuring her vocals.

But even this seemingly ideal life in the City of Light isn’t enough for Zula, a victim of grass-is-always greener dissatisfaction. She confides to a stranger that her life was better in Poland (better to be a big fish in a small pond, apparently). She drinks too much, climbs onto a cafe bar to boogie to Jack Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (it’s her Marilyn Monroe/Anita Ekberg moment) and begins seeing other men.

Then without warning Zula returns to Poland, leaving behind  a jilted and heartbroken Wiktor. He’s so desperate  that he, too, goes back home, knowing his dissident status will undoubtedly mean imprisonment. But it’s worth it just for the occasional visit from  his beloved.

Pawlikowski stages the couple’s fragmented romance as a series of blackout sketches. The narrative jumps years in a single cut as we watch the two lovers age and bend to the vissicitudes of lives lived hard. Finally, in the end, Zula commits to Wiktor in the film’s somber but achingly beautiful final moments.

And for all of its glumness, the film makes some savagely satirical digs at the bad old days under Communism.

“Cold War” is one of the most gorgeously photographed films of all time, with images so clean and crisp  you can practically count the individual threads in Zula’s sweater. Cinematographer Lukas Zal specializes in painstakingly symmetric compositions that give much of the film a sort of visual formality.

Meanwhile the soundtrack provides a rich aural backdrop, from simple folk melodies to bebop, early rock’n’roll and even a bit of Commie-style Mexican pop music.

Kulig and Kot deliver heart-wrenching performances without pushing too hard…these characters talk little and tend to communicate with their bodies. But the dynamics of their tormented relationship are there for anyone to see.

Still, this isn’t precisely a two-character show.  There’s a third wheel here, the Communist bureaucrat Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), who has a talent for survival and yearns himself for Zula’s breath-taking carnality.

The love on display in  “Cold War” is undeniably self-destructive.  But also glorious.

| Robert W. Butler