On Cold War

A Polish folk music film that becomes an episodic, torturous, damaging love story that at times feels like a 50s style news reel and at other the French new wave. Cold War is exceptional. Quietly powerful, quietly unsettling and completely mesmerising.  

The film begins in Poland, at the close of the WWII as a folk music troupe is created to tour the country and the continent spreading a bucolic message of Poland. Success brings attention and soon the powerful begin to influence the routines as images of Stalin and songs of Poland’s strengths are embedded into the rural folk songs of its people’s history. There is a dangerous authority at work behind the scenes.

From Poland we go on to see Berlin and Paris, the latter shot to feel electric, with doorways and window frames offering vistas onto the perpetually moving city. Through one window, while our piano player rests, a woman moves around her apartment across the courtyard. It all feels so real. It is all shot so beautifully, the whole film is crisp black and white, a 4:3 aspect ratio enhancing the sensation of the past, yet also closing in the film’s damaged lovers. Life explodes around them, yet there is no escape for either. And they are magnetic. Film stars in the sense that one cannot look away. Their transformations are significant, but evolve organically and the episodic nature of the narrative never detracts from our attachment to these two. In fact, in enhances it as questions are left unanswered, investing us further into this world.

Cold War does so much, so well in such a short space of time. It is simply stunning filmmaking.