Throughout the past week, awards prognosticators have speculated feverishly about the five directors who would be shortlisted for the directing Oscar. That’s because in recent years, the Academy has gone with predicted favorites for the first four slots, and drawn a wild card on the fifth. This time around, pundits anticipating a surprise nominee put that “fifth slot” money on Paweł Pawlikowski, the acclaimed visionary behind Cold War, Poland’s foreign language entry for the upcoming ceremony. The film is exotic in a way that probably makes members of the directors’ branch feel superior about voting for it: it’s set in France and Germany in addition to Poland, and the characters speak multiple languages interchangeably. All of which is to say that Cold War has not been widely viewed stateside, which actually makes it a likelier nominee: there is nothing the Academy enjoys more than being responsible for a film’s financial success. Of course, Cold War has already won notable prizes in other countries—Pawlikowski claimed Best Director at Cannes, and the film swept the European Film Awards. But America’s most important cinematic recognition? That’s different.
Oscars analysis aside, Cold War is gorgeous, and deserving of whatever accolades it ultimately wins. The film is centered initially around Mazurek, a Polish performance troupe, and then the romance that buds between one of Mazurek’s most promising stars, Zula, and the troupe’s conductor, Wiktor. Faced with the offer of state sponsorship, Mazurek morphs into a touring propaganda-disseminator, and Wiktor cannot in good conscience remain involved. He asks Zula to come to Paris with him, via the French sector of Berlin, when Mazurek has a show there. What happens next is not straightforward, or satisfying, but sensual and intoxicating, a series of fleeting moments, missed connections, romantic frustration and guilt.
Pawlikowski is probably best known for 2014 Foreign Language winner Ida, and, as with that film, he employs a black-and-white palette for Cold War. It’s consistently stunning. Shades of grey are accentuated and juxtaposed in ways that seem almost more appropriate for abstract painting than for cinema. When Viktor and his business partner share a cigarette in one scene, the tendrils of smoke bleed into the dark corners of the frame like running ink, or blood. Lukasz Zal, Cold War’s director of photography, is as interested in composition as he is in technique. The decision to employ a 4:3 aspect ratio—as opposed to the standard 16:9—is potentially constraining, but every paneled wall and tree branch on screen feels essential as a result. The stillness that accompanies this careful construction makes the scattered instances of cascading camera movements feel infinitely more dramatic, and resonant. When Wiktor and Zula argue in a barren field, Zula follows Wiktor as he storms off; she yells expletives, then turns back, toward the lake they were sitting by, and jumps in, fully clothed. A single take depicts this. The use of long pans is not all that different from 2018’s other black-and-white prestige pic, Roma, but here it’s more sparing, reflective of the restraint and caution that defined so much Cold War behavior.
Indeed, much of the conflict arises from the restrictions imposed on Wiktor and Zula by Soviet-controlled Poland. Both wrestle with loyalty and attachment to their home country, and disgust with the freedom it prevents. Even so, Wiktor and Zula’s relationship is arguably dependent on political tensions. The volatility is part of the attraction, and every time the two reconnect, they kiss passionately, knowing that this may be the last time; they are perhaps emboldened by finality. Wiktor and Zula are high maintenance, too, and the viewer suspects they would be passionately splitting up and getting back together even without a high stakes historical event to come between them. It is this independence that forms Cold War’s emotional core: Wiktor and Zula want things other than each other, even as they prioritize one another above everything else.
None of those intricacies would be conveyed without the tour de force that is Joanna Kulig. As Zula, she flits graciously between states of self-pity and self-empowerment, drunken rage and drunken ecstasy, discipline and impulse. Kulig knows how to do a lot with little facial movement, and she leverages subtle distinctions to create a character who we feel like we understand, despite her mysterious past, and extended off-screen periods. When she is dancing—raucous and carefree—on the night of her record début, she is transcendent. I realized then, if I hadn’t already, that Cold War was a masterpiece.
Fergus Campbell is a freshman in Columbia College.