Cold War (2018)

Paweł Pawlikowski's Cold War runs eighty-eight minutes and feels like a held breath. The film follows Wiktor and Zula across Poland, Berlin, Paris, and Yugoslavia, from the late forties into the sixties, and it does so in a stark black-and-white that renders every room a little colder than the last. The camera stays close. The music swells. Then it cuts, often years ahead, leaving us to fill the gap ourselves. This is a picture assembled from fragments, and it trusts the audience to do the arithmetic.

The politics on screen belong to another era of filmmaking. Wiktor resists the Stalinist propaganda demanded of his folk ensemble, defects to the West, and is later sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. Zula drinks, marries for a visa, and eventually marries a man she does not love to buy Wiktor's freedom. These are the wages of living under a regime, rendered without a single speech about the nature of power. The film observes. It does not instruct. Zula is a complicated woman with appetites and failures, and the screenplay never pauses to congratulate itself for writing her that way.

This is a love story of the old school: doomed, obsessive, and entirely uninterested in the cultural preoccupations of the present decade. There is no messaging, no moral ledger, no scene in which a character explains the film's position to another character who ought to know better. Pawlikowski, working loosely from his own parents' lives, keeps his gaze on faces and light. The result is a film that will satisfy anyone seeking craft, and disappoint anyone seeking a sermon. We score it accordingly, and we do so without regret.