In the 1930s, the Library of Congress sent musicologists into the American countryside to document fast-fading rural traditions. According to Cold War, Communist Poland did something similar after World War II. The Oscar-nominated film opens with musicians and singers in remote villages—a bagpipe-fiddle duo droning with music as old as the Earth, girls singing love songs in the darkest shades of melancholy—being recorded on reel-to-reel by an earnest team of musicologists. Not unlike the U.S. a decade before, the project is also a springboard from the front porch to the concert stage for a few performers able to make the transition.
Cold War’s protagonists are the musicologist-arranger Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and the village girl he loves and mentors, Zula (Joanna Kulig). Wiktor’s pursuit of authentic folk music is called to question when he asks about the number she sings while auditioning for his state-sponsored folklore troupe. Turns out the song wasn’t handed down generation to generation. Zula heard it in a Soviet movie screened in her village. Well, it’s a good tune, sung in a voice like crystal. She passes the audition.
Music-in-performance is Cold War’s backdrop, the milieu of its talented protagonists. A tragic love story, Cold War concerns the distorting gravity of bad politics on the arts as well as personal life. Before long, the cultural bureaucrats insist on songs about land reform and productions that “show gratitude” for Comrade Stalin. Wiktor and Zula feel stifled and under surveillance. As Zula admits in a tender moment, she’s been drafted as an informer by Wiktor’s ideologically correct colleague, Lech (Borys Szyc). He wants to know if Wiktor listens to American radio, has foreign currency, believes in God…
When their troupe performs in East Berlin, Wiktor and Zula are handed their chance. It’s 1952, a decade before the Wall, and escape is relatively easy. Wiktor stands at their rendezvous point near West Berlin’s French sector and waits—and waits. Hours pass in the cold night. Finally, he dashes alone across the line and ends up in Paris, playing piano with an African American expatriate jazz combo. He’s free but has left part of himself behind. He’s still in love with Zula—and perhaps with the country he fled.
Cold War also concerns affairs less definable than political borders as it explores the unstable, destructive tendencies within the human heart. Filmed in stark black and white, Cold War visually evokes European art-house cinema during the timespan of its story, the late 1940s through the early 1960s. And like leading figures in Europe’s cinema from that era, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski has no use for happy Hollywood conventions. Cold War deserves its three Oscar nominations: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director and Best Cinematography.
