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.
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| 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.
