“Cold War”: grim black and white drama about Communism, millennials need to watch this
“Cold War” (“Nimna wojna“, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is a succinct period drama set in post war eastern Europe from 1949-1964 that should remind millennial viewers today of what Communism was really like and how it perverted the individual for the same of the “common good”.
The film is in black and white with minimal aspect (1.37.1).
As the film opens, after some barren scenery, Tomasz Kot (Wiktor Warski) and Irena (Agata Kulesza) have leased a war-damaged estate in Poland where they set up an arts training school. But it is really an academy where kids and young adults are weeded out of any life with the arts. And the singing and music making, however inspirational with some late romantic music, is very much about the “we” and the collective experience. There are appeals to what sound close to almost fascist nationalism, as well as worship of Stalin. The film never references Shostakovich, but it obviously wants to send a message about the politicization of music for group-centered, totalitarian ideologies.
But Tomasz falls in love with a singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) and the film gradually turns into a story about various temptations to defect to the West, as they travel to Germany, France, and later Yugoslavia (now Croatia). It starts to take on the look of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”.
There is a lot of music: the Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu, and a Bach Goldberg variation in the closing credits.
I visited Poland myself in May 1999, spending a day at Auschwitz (relatively uncrowded) and the salt mine, and then a train ride to Warsaw, seeing the still peasant farmers from the train. Poland has been more socially conservative than Western Europe, decrying gay rights partly on concerns of underpopulation.
I can remember high school government in 1961 with a final exam essay question: “Compare communism to democracy.”
There was a 4-minute short film “Wakened Dream” by Mary M, about a baby’s view of the world, which seems like an end-of-life review.
Name: “Cold War”
Director, writer: Pawel Pawlikowski
Released: 2019
Format: 1.37:1
When and how viewed: 2019/1/8 at the Film Forum, a non-profit theater on Houston St in NYC, afternoon, good crowd
Length: 89
Rating: R
Companies: Amazon Studios, Apocalypso, MK2, Opus, Protagonist
Stars: ****_
(Posted: Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 6 PM EST)