Provokr Pick: Cold War
Polished Polish Filmmaking
Polish writer/director Paweł Pawlikowski simultaneously pushes the medium forward and takes us back in time with his latest film, Cold War. Set in the 1950s, the film follows characters who are loosely based on his own parents as they navigate their complicated and tumultuous courtship in post-World War II Poland. While the storyline itself is compelling and full of sincere emotion and award-worthy performances from actors Tomasz Kot and Agata Kulesza, the film also continues Pawlikowski’s vivid visual approach to filmmaking.
Like his previous film, the Oscar-winning Ida, Cold War is shot in the old-timey 4:3 aspect ratio, in black and white. With a sparse runtime of only 85 minutes, it’s a film on a mission, to entertain and deliver its message without stopping to demand the audience admire its bells and whistles. Less gimmicky than The Artist, which leaned on the old-fashioned leanings of the Academy to wriggle its way towards an unexpected Best Picture win, Cold War uses its narrow field of view and monochrome color spectrum as more than just a visual trick; it truly transports viewers to a part of the world, and a time in history, that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Like La La Land, Cold War uses showmanship and musicality to deliberately cover-up (and ultimately expose) the fragile underpinnings of the relationship between its two leads, who grow distant but reunite as the years go by, but in a much more believable, relatable fashion than La La Land‘s acquiescence to the trappings of Hollywood glamor. In America, glitz was a result of excess, a point of pride in a first-world country; in Europe, entertainers and their art were like a salve for the heightened tensions of the Cold War, which was such a dominating factor in the lives of many in the region, just west of the Iron Curtain, with Poland itself falling under Soviet control.
Cold War is in theaters now.
