Pawel Pawlikowski follows up 'Ida' with an elliptical, haunting love story that spans two decades and three countries. Sometimes, a kinetic film finds stillness only in its final moments. The last shot of Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War is of a field of empty grasslands. For a while, nothing moves. Then, the winds change; a gust whips through blades of grass, sweeping an invisible current. Time happens to all of us, this shot seems to suggest. Time is the elliptical agent of Pawlikowski's film, about two ill-suited lovers whose passion bends at its passage. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a conductor in 1950s post-war Soviet Poland, meets the gorgeous Zula (Joanna Kulig) when she comes in for an audition at his folk music academy. Though not the most technically talented vocalist at the open call, Zula has "something"—a charisma, a magnetism, a sense of cunning. Wiktor casts her. Thus begins a romance that will span a decade and a divided continent, from Poland to Germany to Yugoslavia to France, and then back again to the native soil. Read More...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Monday, 12 November, 2018