Love in a Cold War Climate
Posted
By Jonah Raskin On January 15, 2019 @ 1:40 am In
articles 2015 |
Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot in
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War. Amazon Studios.
It’s not a Hollywood movie.
That’s clear from the start. Cold War (2018), the feature film
made by the Polish-born director, Pawel Pawlikowski, is in black-and-white. The
characters have names like Wiktor, Kaczmarek and Mazurek, and the actors
include Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot and Borys Szyc to give just a few from a large
cast of characters. There isn’t a James, a Barbara or a Marilyn among them,
though Kulig turns in a credible performance as a kind of Polish Marilyn Monroe
who makes her way up the ladder of success and then throws it all away.
No American or British director
has made a movie titled “Cold War,” but many American and British directors
have taken slices from the big Cold War pie and hurled them at the big screen,
some with logic and beauty. Think of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), which
is set in Vienna right after the end of World War II and that stars Orson
Welles as Harry Lime, the American hustler and human rat out to make a profit
at everyone else’s expense.
Think also of Stanley
Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) with Peter Sellers, George C.
Scott and Sterling Hayden, which persuaded audiences to laugh at the nuclear
apocalypse and not cower under it.
Pawel Pawlikowski was born in
Warsaw in 1957, when the Cold War was very hot, indeed. The Russians launched
Sputnik in 1957 and the space race was off and running.
Pawlikowski left Poland
at the age of 14, later attended Oxford University and made his first
movie, From Moscow to Pietushki with Benny Yerofeyev, in 1990.
The Cold War has long haunted
him. His film, Cold War, offers a Polish take on the mega
conflict between the two superpowers, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., that
mushroomed after the end of World War II and that ended, according to some
American politicians, with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which now
seems like a long time ago and another era.
Revisionist historians such as D.
F. Fleming, the author of The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, argue
that the Cold War began when the Western powers tried to throttle the Bolshevik
Revolution and prevent Communism from spreading like the plague.
Contemporary
pundits and journalists insist that the Cold War is alive and doing well, thank
you, despite the seeming bromance between Trump and Putin, two thugs recycled
from the junk heap of authoritarian personalities as old as Stalin and Joe
McCarthy and as new as themselves.
Pawlikowski’s film has already
won international recognition, including the award for best director at Cannes.
It has been nominated for an Oscar as the best foreign film of 2018. Cold
War has a lot going for it, including the romance between a dark, tall
handsome man and a gorgeous, impulsive woman who love each other and betray
each another, break up with one another and get back together again. Their
relationship is as crazy as the Cold War itself. Joanna Kulig and Tomasz
Kot play two lovers who can’t detach from one another, though their
relationship is corrosive and though they wander back and forth from one side
of the so-called “Iron Curtain” to the other and from East to West and back to
East.
Pawlikowski uses music as a
vehicle to tell his Cold War story, which doesn’t take sides,
much as his lovers don’t affiliate permanently either with capitalism or
Eastern bloc socialism.
Cold War moves
from Polish folk music to western jazz and then to rock n’ roll. Each new
musical wave carries the plot forward. Each one feels surprising as it unfolds
on the screen, but at the end when one looks back at the movie, the music feels
inevitable and predictable. Of course, there’s going to be jazz and then rock
‘n’ roll in a movie about a female singer and a male piano player and conductor
in the 1940s and 1950s. But the music is also energetic and worth hearing.
Cold War offers
stark Eastern European settings. The language is mostly Polish, with English
subtitles and the pace is much slower than blockbuster Hollywood films. But it
does have a Hollywood ending. Zula and Wiktor come together once again. Still,
it’s not clear if they’re going to live with one another, or commit suicide and
cross the boundary that divides life from death. If nothing else, they’re
people who break boundaries.
I
recommend the film. Joanna Kulig is beautiful, sexy and smart as Kulig [actually it is Zula]. Tomasz
Kot is crafty, creative and romantic as Wiktor. The images on screen are
enticing and the camera work is often dazzling. But the big draw is
Pawlikowski’s handling of the Cold War, which has no precise beginning, no clear
ending in sight, and that’s always ripe for artistic interpretation.
Viewers
like me, and my peers who remember the deep-seated American fear of Communism
will relate to the story instinctively. Those who came of age in the 1980s,
when Reagan revived the Cold War, will likely remember the high jinks of that
era and vault into the picture.
Members
of those two generations and younger viewers will also identify with the
characters who try to save their souls and their integrity as artists, and who
are compromised by power politics and the ravages of the Cold War that nobody
won.
Article
printed from www.counterpunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment