3.5 stars. Rated R, for nudity, sexual content and profanity
By Derrick Bang
Literature is laden with swooning sagas of lovers who never quite get their timing right: They’re from different social strata; he’s available, but she’s married; she divorces, but he has moved to another country; and so forth.
 |
| As they settle into a relationship, Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) realize that they want different things out of life. Alas, that will become a growing problem, as it also becomes clear that they cannot live without each other. |
Director/co-scripter Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, Poland’s Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, cleverly sets that timeless plot device against that country’s emergence from the ruins of World War II. The narrative takes place over the course of roughly 15 years, and is based on the lives of Pawlikowski’s parents, who — in the filmmaker’s own words — “spent 40 years together, on and off, breaking up, chasing and punishing each other on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
“They were both strong, wonderful people. But as a couple, they were a never-ending disaster.”
Indeed, this film’s characters — Zula and Wiktor — are named after Pawlikowski’s mother and father, who died in 1989: in a final slice of heavy irony, just before the Berlin Wall came down.
No surprise, then, that Pawlikowski’s approach has the sweeping, unapologetically dreamy atmosphere of classic Hollywood gothic tragedies such as Wuthering Heights. But Pawlikowski also gets considerable gravitas from the ominous and repressive geo-political environment in which this love story takes place, and which gives his film its title.
The saga begins in 1949, as skilled pianist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and music ethnographer Irena (Agata Kulesza) tour their country’s devastated villages and hamlets, collecting folk songs as a means of preserving regional heritage. They also have a much grander goal: to use this music as the basis for a song and dance performance ensemble, appropriately costumed, to share such culture with a broader national audience.
They subsequently establish a rigorous school of performing arts, where talented young men and women will be groomed for what comes to be known as the Mazurek Ensemble. Wiktor and Irena’s activities are supervised by Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), a manager of sorts — handler? watchdog? — soon to become an authoritarian apparatchik.
During auditions, Wiktor is struck by the spirit, presence and radiant beauty of teenage Zula (Joanna Kulig). Irena, not fooled for a moment — she and Wiktor have been a casual item — tolerantly agrees to accept the girl into the company. By the time the students have been trained into an accomplished unit routinely performing to enthusiastic, sell-out crowds, Wiktor and Zula have become impassioned lovers.
At this point, the ensemble has come to the attention of Poland’s communist government, which views it as a useful propaganda tool. During a frigidly polite meeting, party officials blandly encourage Wiktor — as music director — to enhance the repertoire with politically appropriate “message songs.” Irena objects strongly; the savvy Kaczmarek — sensing which way the wind is blowing — sees no harm in acquiescence.
And, just like that, Irena simply disappears from the story.
(Pawlikowski and his co-scripters — Janusz Glowacki and Piotr Borkowski — draw from established history. The Mazurek Ensemble is based on the actual Mazowsze folk music and dance group, founded in 1948 and soon co-opted by Poland’s government.)
Wiktor remains silent, but his musical taste is the clue to his feelings: He loves jazz, and we can assume — from what occurs later in the film — that, as a student, he likely trained in Paris and became comfortable with what communists soon condemned as the “decadent art of the bourgeoisie.” Understanding that he’ll never enjoy similar musical freedom in the Polish People’s Republic, Wiktor plans to escape to the West, while border crossings still are comparatively unrestricted.
He wants Zula to join him, but the depth of her love for him is matched by an equally stubborn streak of pragmatism. She knows that Wiktor is extremely talented, and could become famous in the West; she similarly understands that she has peaked, as a Mazurek star. It’s a comfortable life, and she has no objection to communism, so why abandon it?
And so the agonizing pattern is established.
Pawlikowski divides his film into distinct segments separated by intermittent blackouts, viewers given only time and place as each new chapter begins: 1949 Poland, 1952 East Berlin, 1954 Paris, 1955 Yugoslavia, and so forth. Although this seems a fragmented manner of storytelling, all necessary information is conveyed by how Wiktor and Zula behave, each time they reconnect. Some reunions last for weeks or months; others are only a few brief minutes.
The dynamic becomes ever more painful, because it’s clear that these two people genuinely adore each other, but — pulled by external forces — they just can’t make it work.
Kot’s Wiktor is stoic, often silent, his expressions and frequently intense gaze nonetheless conveying a wealth of emotion. He’s not necessarily sympathetic, particularly at first, when he seems to be taking advantage of a teenage girl; sexual fidelity also doesn’t seem high on his list. (In fairness, it isn’t high on anybody’s list.)
But we soon grieve for Wiktor, because Kot so persuasively conveys the anguish of a man caught between art and love, and the realization that he’ll never be able to have both. Pawlikowski draws an impressively subtle — and yet richly detailed — performance from Kot, particularly as we move into the devastating final acts.
Kulig, in turn, makes Zula a blazing free spirit who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks — she comes to Mazurek under mildly false pretenses, with quite a back-story — and is determined to live life according to her own desires. She’s the epitome of nascent rock ’n’ roll’s “live fast, die young” mantra, and yet she’s equally trapped: Her ferocious independence is undercut, time and again, by her inability to survive without Wiktor.
Cinematographer Lukasz Zal also frames Kulig in a manner that enhances Zula’s voluptuous aura; she’s a creature who clearly needs sex as much as food and oxygen.
Do we actually like these characters? That’s a tough and debatable question: a reaction that I’m sure would delight Pawlikowski. Ultimately, it probably doesn’t matter whether we admire Wiktor and Zula, as long as we understand them. And that we do.
Zal’s luxurious black-and-white cinematography has much to do with this film’s deeply emotional atmosphere; his handling of mood is masterful, whether drifting slowly through the ruins of a countryside church, or focusing tightly on the jazz musicians in a dimly illuminated Parisian nightclub.
His best-composed shot comes early, as Wiktor and Irena discuss their initial success during an after-performance party: a tableau that focuses on them, amid a room filled to bursting with performers and patrons. Only after a few moments, do we realize that Wiktor and Irena are standing in front of a huge mirror, in which all these other people are reflected.
No surprise, then, that Zal’s camerawork also has been Oscar-nominated, along with Pawlikowski’s directing skills.
Music plays an equally important role in this saga, from the quaint country folk songs against which we meet our primary characters, to the Gershwin classics played so energetically by Wiktor. Pay close attention, because the lyrics in a few of those folk ballads deliberately anticipate subsequent dramatic beats.
All this said, there’s no denying — even at a surprisingly economical 89 minutes — that Pawlikowski’s film feels slow. It’s not insufferably sluggish and self-indulgently precious, in the butt-numbing manner of Roma or The Favourite, but it does require a willingness to be swept away by the obsessive ardor that traps Wiktor and Zula, and by the sumptuously retro sensibilities with which Pawlikowski has constructed his film.
That may be a tall order, in these cynical times.
No comments:
Post a Comment