In the Cold War between Soviet Union’s socialist Eastern Bloc and United States’ capitalist Western Bloc, the term “cold” amounts to a state of tension in which they is no direct battle between the two sides. That each of them participated in proxy wars made the conflict a little more intangible — one that was sensed, but never quite seen. This lasted for approximately 45 years. Polish master Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest film, Cold War , is 85-minutes long. Set in the slipstream of the Second World War, it is a black-and-white love story between a musician named Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and his troupe’s star singer, Zula (Joanna Kulig). Yet, the film’s emotional politics reflect the academic definition of the title.
Cinematic allegory
Wiktor is the Free World; he quits after the State begins to dictate artistic expression, and eventually drifts across Europe as an independent jazz composer. Zula is the Communist regime; she stays, and achieves fame by choosing power over freedom. They reunite no less than four times over the film’s long 15-year period. Never directly, never permanently, but always as an extension of their own deflected individualism.
Pawlikowski’s unusual triumph lies in the way he subverts our notion of the archetypical “epic”. There is nothing visibly black — no montages of depression, or brooding gestures of self-destruction — about the film. And there is certainly nothing white — no serendipitous musical cues, snowy locales or outbursts of desire (the love-making, too, is shown mid-act; we don’t see the impassioned triggers or post-coital bliss) – about the film. It’s the greys in between that form its core. The question is seldom about how, or how long before, they meet again. It is never about the husbands she abandons. The circumstances are incidental.
Romantic interludes
Instead, we hear the highlights of stilted companionship. The moonlit boat rides across the Seine. The beautiful songs she sings on stage. Her casual humming while wading across a pond she has angrily leapt into. His withering look when she drunkenly dances to a Bill Haley & His Comets song at a party. The narrative jumps forward with minimal fuss, and eschews the sensationalism of tortured love. The highs and lows, the discreet letters and stolen glances, are sensed but never seen.
In fact, the first time they reunite in Paris, it’s only a minute of screen-time after she ditched him in Berlin two years ago. In another film, her wintry moment of betrayal might have been milked. Here, we barely realise he is waiting. The bartender’s eyes dart towards the door. Zula, older but no wiser, enters. Rather than focus on Wiktor’s joy, or Zula’s shame, the scene immediately cuts to them walking down the cobblestoned streets. We are only left to imagine if they embraced, or smiled, or wept. Another few minutes later, she appears in Paris again, married, and barging in on his studio session as if it were the next day.
Counting the days
Most love stories thrive on making us feel the passage of time. They hinge on internalising the interminable wait between meetings. Doctor Zhivago and Gone WithThe Wind are 200-minutes long; others like Titanic, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Blue is the Warmest Colour run for three-plus hours. By dramatising the departures and the isolation, they lend love a sense of immortality — the kind that presumably has the two characters pining for each other every second they are apart. If they meet after ages, the films don’t hesitate to remind us that the lovers were obsessively counting down the days to this precise moment.
But as we have learned from experience, real life is less drastic. Missing someone, after all, isn’t an “action”. Most people — who go about leading a regular, fulfilling life in the interim — might not even then realise that their heart is broken until they come in close proximity with the past. Pawlikowski recognises this clipped pragmatism of adulthood. He omits the romanticism of pain and longing without compromising on the romance. Cold War , then, becomes the cinematic equivalent of calendar pages being flipped by a soothing breeze.
Wiktor and Zula function normally away from one another. Which is why their proxy wars – external aspects like her marriage, his career — are more sensed than seen. As a result, the togetherness in Cold War is one that transcends the concept of time rather than time itself. Rather than dwell upon the lean years, the film itself becomes lean to contextualise their struggle. That is: the narrative language of cinema emulates the political grammar of war. 1949 becomes 1964, but love remains a person instead of a feeling. Detachment remains a couple collapsing in a musty restroom. And “timeless” stops being just an adjective.
