Cold War

Cold War (2018) begins in Poland in 1949. A music director is collecting folk songs in villages and forming a state sponsored folk ensemble. At the auditions he finds a singer. Their relationship stretches over fifteen years and across Warsaw, Berlin, Paris and Yugoslavia, and every meeting is divided by a border. Paweł Pawlikowski made it loosely from the lives of his own parents, and it is dedicated to them. It was shot in black and white in a nearly square frame. Łukasz Żal was the cinematographer. The most memorable thing in it is a song. The folk tune Dwa serduszka is heard four different ways across the film: unaccompanied in a village, arranged for chorus on a stage, as jazz in Paris, and finally somewhere else entirely. Each transformation says where the characters have been carried. It runs 88 minutes and that is deliberate; Pawlikowski tells fifteen years in the shortest possible form, jumping years between scenes and explaining none of the transitions. He won Best Director at Cannes in 2018. The film received three nominations at the 91st Academy Awards: Foreign Language Film, Director and Cinematography. It runs 88 minutes. Good for: black and white photography, music driven narrative, and Eastern European history. Less good for: because the film skips the years between them, attachment is hard and the relationship is never explained. The emotional distance is cold. The ending is abrupt and, for many viewers, unprepared.