“Dark eyes, you are crying because we cannot be together.”

From the folk song sung in Cold War

The first film we watched was Cold War directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and released in 2018. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Academy Awards but lost to Roma because I guess the Academy had to give the Best Picture award to Green Book for some misguided political reason.

Cold War explores a tempestuous relationship between two Polish people from the 1940s through the 1960s. Wiktor is collecting Polish folk songs as part of a state sponsored mission. He meets Zula when auditioning singers to comprise a performance group. When the group is a success and the state wants to change the content to contain less traditional material and more pieces glorifying the current political regime, Wiktor decides to flee to France and take Zula with him. However, at the last minute Zula doesn’t show. This sparks the first of many physical separations between the two, (though it was not the first emotional one). They bounce into and out of each other’s lives, incapable of living fully without one another, but also incapable of staying together. Pawlikowski has said that he used his own parents’ relationship as inspiration for this fictional duo.

Michael: I didn’t care for this. I hate slice-of-life movies, and this was very slice of life-y.

So are a lot of movies in the Criterion Collection. Maybe he’ll like just one of the slice-of-life films eventually? …not holding my breath.

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I’m a sucker for really well told passionate romances, like Moulin Rouge and Gone with the Wind. I’m also a sucker for tragic romances, like Moulin Rouge and Gone with the Wind. Cold War really played on my tragic passion romance fetish. Here were two characters kept apart not only by outer circumstances but by their intense desire for one another conflicting with their emotional and intellectual insecurities.

Michael: I just hate when characters get all Downton Abbey on me and they decide they can’t be together for no reason.

Jordan: There were plenty of reasons for them not to be together!

Michael: None of them were good reasons! It was all nonsense, and I didn’t care for it.

That’s why he wasn’t as snuggly as I wanted him to be during the movie! While I was reveling in the romance, he was rolling his eyes at the perceived ridiculousness of the character’s choices.

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Though filmed recently, Pawlikowski uses a 1.37:1 aspect ratio (for those of you who don’t know aspect ratios, that’s where the picture looks like a square like in old movies or how TVs used to look) and black and white cinematography to emphasize the time period in which the film is set.

I loved the black and white photography. It enabled the film to focus on the depth and intimacy of the relationship between the two main characters. There were so many beautiful shots where color may have asked the viewer to focus on the more shallow aspects of the image—the dress Zula was wearing, the pageantry of the folk dancing, the characters in the nightclub. Using a grayscale color palette turned my focus from the surface environment to the emotional current that was flowing underneath. When you can’t focus on how colorful everything looks, you concentrate more on the expressions on the actors’ faces, on the way they move (or don’t move) through the frame. The shadows and play of light worked to emphasize the mental and emotional state of the characters, allowing the performances to really shine and the compositions of the shots to tell an incredibly layered story. This film cries out for repeated viewings.

Michael: Yeah. I have no desire to ever see that movie again. It was a fine film, there was nothing wrong with it, it’s just not for me.

Guess it’s one I’ll be repeating on my own…

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This is definitely one of those films where it sucks to use subtitles. I mean, they speak at least six different languages throughout the film (Polish, Croatian, Russian, German, Italian, and French) so unless you’re a language whiz at some point you’re going to need the subtitles. There were just so many shots where Pawlikowski and director of photography Łukasz Żal use the bottom third of the frame for the main characters and the upper two thirds as head space. It’s very striking and pleasing to the eye. Then those subtitles pop up, marring the bottom third and ruining the composition of the shot.

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Michael: There was one thing I really didn’t like, and I know it’s just me, I know this is my thing, I know that it’s my opinion…but it’s so close to being set in Hungary and it’s just not. I really wanted it to be Hungary.

Jordan: The director is Polish.

Michael: Still…

For those who don’t know, Michael has Hungarian ancestry on both his father’s and his mother’s side. He spent three summers working in Hungary, makes goulash every winter when it gets especially cold outside, has been teaching himself how to speak Hungarian through a combination of language books and Duolingo, and even convinced me to spend half our honeymoon in Budapest. (To be fair, it was the right decision. That was an amazing trip, and I want to go back.)

Michael: I really liked that song, though.

Jordan: Yes, and I loved how it changed throughout the film. Every version was a new reflection of where their relationship was, what they were going through, how they had changed.

Michael: I really liked the folk dancing, too. But I didn’t like it because of the movie. I would have liked it just in general.

Jordan: There was nothing about how it was filmed or used in this film that made you like it, you’re just interested in folk traditions in that part of the world.

Michael: Yeah.

Michael’s Rating: Two and a Half Pierogis