Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War , a contender for the highest prize at Cannes, takes viewers through the ups and downs in the love lives of musicians Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Viktor (Tomasz Kot) through a little over a decade — from 1949 to 1964 — during the Cold War.
Ostensibly based on the life of his own parents after whom the lead characters are named, Cold War is more about the many separations than a few shared moments between Zula and Viktor. In that it reminds one a lot of Mikhail Kalatozov’s war-time tragic romance The Cranes Are Flying that won the top prize at Cannes in 1958.
In Pawlikowski’s film, war has given way to an uneasy peace. State control still looms large and escape through defections is one of the ways out for individuals to seek their own dreams and destinies. Cold War is all about seeing the personal in the political and the political in the personal.
The filmmaker comments on state interference in the performing arts: the disapproval of ethnic songs, for instance. But he is more interested in the human repercussions of politics; how individual desires get smothered in the grim march of time and history.
Zula and Viktor find their equivalents in Qiao (Tao Zhao) and Bin (Fan Liao) in Jia Zhangke’s turn-of-the-century love story, Ash Is Purest White , set in world of gambling dens and mob violence .
Qiao, who journeys from being a moll to the gangland boss herself, offers an interesting feminist twist to what is essentially perceived as a male genre.
Zhangke’s work can’t be divested of the socio-economic echoes of a changing China. The landscape tells its own tale in the coal mine town where the story is set. Qiao, who is devoted to Bin, ends up serving a sentence for his sake and comes back to realise that everyone, including Bin, have moved on.
Eventually, the tables are turned. Bin ends up being the vulnerable one in need of the support of Qiao, a complex character rendered even more layered by the luminous Tao Zhao.
