Cold War opens beautifully and the first ten minutes or so suggest a riveting investigation of issues which are as vivid today as they were in 1949, when these opening scenes occur. Issues such as the dangerous notion of racial or cultural purity; the malign influence of walls; the political manipulation of ‘tradition’. These issues are explored within the context of the protagonist Wictor’s mission to collate and document, as part of the communist cultural aparatus, Polish folk songs. A communist Alan Lomax. However, this is just the framework for a narrative which soon veers off in another direction altogether, becoming a love story as Wictor falls for Zula, a high-spirited, young singer-dancer who’s enlisted as part of the troupe Wictor is putting together to tour and showcase these folk songs. Once the group has been set up, the political-cultural agenda of the film falls away and we’re caught up in a prosaic love story. One where the pretty younger woman supposedly falls for the craggy older man and together they embark on doomed Europe-wide love affair. Quite apart from the fact that the film seems to abandon its fascinating thematic context after fifteen minutes, there’s the additional problem that these two people seem to lack any kind of chemistry. They don’t laugh, they don’t talk to each other, they don’t do much except gaze at one another in a faintly narcissistic fashion and snog a lot. And sometimes play music together. There are inevitable comparisons with La-La Land, but whatever else you might say about Chazelle’s film, there was chemistry between Stone and Gosling, they came across as two people who enjoyed each other’s company. When the Polish couple’s relationship hits the rocks soon after they’ve finally got together after 10 years of separation, it comes as no surprise. Sooner or later you’re going to get bored of chewing each other’s faces, no matter how varied and beautiful the scenery.
Which is another issue: the film’s beauty begins to feel counter-productive. Nowhere more so than a sequence in Croatia, which seems shoe-horned in largely so that a beautiful shot of a cathedral fronted by urchins playing football can add to the film’s aesthetic capital. When they are finally united in Paris, the couple live in a garrett which looks like something you’d nowadays pay an arm and a leg for on AirBnB. This is supposed to be a gritty story about the desperate struggle of two people to find love in spite of the geo-political odds, but increasingly it starts to feel like an ad for a very expensive perfume. Even the best scenes, such as Zula’s frenetic and desperate jive in a Paris nightclub, are subsumed by the aesthetic: more interested in how her desperation looks than how it feels.
Cold War presents history as instagram project. Choose your setting and enact a scene of passion, throw yourself in each other’s arms and hold that kiss. As though the sufferings caused by the Cold War were ultimately something rather glamorous, and if you wanted a break you could always nip across the border (to Paris) or marry a Sicilian count and high-tail it round Europe for a few years, before deciding it hasn’t really worked out and heading home. The realities of the Cold War in eastern Europe, as the films of Wajda or Kieslowski or even Zulawski make clear, were nothing like this. The further we move away from the actuality of historical events, the more they become deformed; their realities distorted and caricatured. In an age where we are suffering in a very visceral fashion from the gross over-simplification of recent historical processes, Cold War offers a surprisingly lumpen vision of the history its title refers to. This is painting-by-numbers history. Beautifully painted, of that there’s no doubt, the composition and camera work is well-nigh flawless. However all those other elements of cinematic narrative: character, dialogue, plot, are simplified to such a degree that it feels at times as though one is watching the over-extended trailer for a vastly more interesting film than the one which is playing on screen.
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