電影《沒有煙硝的愛情》影評：[Film Review] Cold War (2018) 8.4/10

5 years has fleetingly elapsed, COLD WAR, Pawal Pawlikowski’s long-in-gestation follow-up of IDA (2013), grandly takes audience back to the familiar allure of his trademark monochrome and frame rigidity.

Spanning over 15 years from 1949 to 1964, COLD WAR traverses back and forth in-between both sides of the Iron Curtain, with the fate of our star-crossed Polish lovers Zula (Kulig) and Wiktor (Kot) dangling in a gloomy atmosphere of uncertainty. Inspired by the lives of his parents (using their real names to christen our protagonists), Pawlikowski prioritizes a deeply felt romance under the spotlight, Zula, a defiant, exuberant girl endowed with a malleable voice and supple physicality, who has served time for critically injuring her father (and there is a legit reason behind that), sees an opportunity to join a state-funded musical troupe which promulgates indigenous folk heritage (but par for the course will be encroached by agitprop) as an expedient to bail out of her plight, and Wiktor is a proficient pianist from an intelligentsia background, who insists to select her at the first place, despite the misgivings from his colleague Irina (Kulesza, back with a much small role).

Zula has an unfettered spirit, which draws attraction to a sensitively withdrawn Wiktor, who is mulling over the option of defection to the west during one of their gigs in Berlin, which colors their torrid love affair, after being separated by the incorporeal barrier, through the following years, the lovebird can only meet infrequently according to the troupe’s ports of all, soon Zula find an exit route by marrying an Italian man, thus she is able to legally come to Paris to reunite with Wiktor, who exercises his trade in a jazz club (the fantastic music numbers are arranged by Marcin Masecki), but their ideological fissure slowly starts to tell (projecting on the surface as jealousy and wantonness), not enough love can hold them together in an idealized Paris, where an uprooted Zula ostensibly emblazons her pride which masks her maladaptation and wounded dignity, she must go back to Poland. Eventually Wiktor follows suit, but he has to answer for his defection first, and where do the lovebirds go? 「The other side of the road」 hits home in its literal and metaphorical double meaning with a bleak but stunningly poetic pillow shot that divinely wraps up the story. Both Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig shine in their leading performances wherein the former excels in infusing a man’s affecting vulnerability that strikes resoundingly against his towering stature, and the latter is such a stupendous songbird, who is also accorded with an elemental register that as piercing as the amazing Jessica Chastain.

While IDA mostly points up Pawlikowski’s outstanding structural precision in his unorthodox composition and dramatic impact, on top of which, COLD WAR majestically marries a kaleidoscopic onrush of musical empathy into the narrative’s elliptical snapshots which signposts the significant moments in Zula and Wiktor’s lives, running the gamut from folksy primitivity, propaganda formality to jazzy freewheeling and chanteuse melancholia, together with its optical magic, COLD WAR is an unequivocal corker of divine synesthesia, and an irrefutable testimony of a Cannes’ BEST DIRECTOR recipient’s superfine felicity.

referential entry: Pawlikowski’s IDA (2013, 7.3/10).