In post-World War II Poland, a singer and a piano player find each other, fall in love and soon end up on opposite sides of history.
“Cold War” is one of those love-among-the-ruins romances that turn suffering into high style. Like its two sexy leads — who fall for each other and keep on falling — the movie has been built for maximum seduction. It has just enough politics to give it heft, striking black-and-white images and an in-the-mood-for-love ambiguity that suggests great mysteries are in store for those who watch and wait. You won’t wait long. The movie runs just 89 minutes, during which swathes of the 20th century flutter by like a flipbook.
It opens in Poland in 1949 with Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, a genius of slow-burning longing), a musician, touring the countryside gathering folk music. He and an attractively no-nonsense colleague, Irena (Agata Kulesza), record villagers whose plaintive, haunting music is a vestige of the rapidly receding past. (Their work brings to mind that of the American musicologist Alan Lomax, who made field recordings of folk musicians.) The writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski doesn’t tend to overshare, but the government toady riding with Wiktor and Irena telegraphs that the recordings have a less than innocent purpose.
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That official emissary is Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), who with Wiktor and Irena facilitates the creation of a folk dance and music ensemble, Mazurek, housed in a depilated country villa. (The ensemble is based on a real Polish group, Mazowsze .) It’s at this villa that young dancers, singers and musicians are to dedicate themselves to the nation’s patrimony (“music, born in the fields”) in what Kaczmarek describes as a “the fierce and noble struggle.” As Wiktor and Irena silently watch, conveying much through expressive silence, Kaczmarek tries to stir up the quiet crowd of applicants. “No more will the talents of the people go to waste — hurrah!” he announces, earning a weak cheer.
The relative exoticism of the milieu and all the healthy young people who soon fill the ensemble generate more enthusiasm for the viewer, as does the arresting black-and-white imagery.
