Movie Review Cold War

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2018 – Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski The third of nine movies in the Preston based UCLan Worldwise Learning Centre International Movie Festival. An incredible tragic love story set over many years from 1949 to the mid-1960’s, showing how the conflict between East & West Europe tears apart love, art and meaning. Tomas Kot is Wiktor Worski, a conductor seeking talented singers for recordings and performances of traditional Polish folk music, seeing the medium as endangered in the ravages of the Nazi occupation. Among these selected for his choir is Zula, played by Joanna Kulig, though she has actually duped her way into the auditions, being a city girl masquerading as a peasant lady and also a troubled young lady on probation following her attempted murder of her abusive father. As the celebrated singers tour Eastern Europe, Worski & Zula become lovers, but the team is forced to start adding pro-Stalinist propaganda anthems to their performance lists. The performers are unhappy but they have no choice but to conform. During a visit to East Berlin in the early 1950’s the severely disillusioned Worski arranges to defect, taking Zula with him to the West, but when he crosses the border, she does not go. They eventually reunite for a short time in a Parisian jazz club, but both are now in other relationships in which neither are happy. Worski tries to reunite with Zula when he sees her performing in Yugoslavia only to be forced to leave the Communist controlled country by the authorities. He returns to Paris at the dawn of the Rock & Roll Era. Zula follows him, marrying another man just to get a visa to get to France to see Warski, and as both are plunging into alcoholism, they fight over his previous lovers and she returns to Poland. Worski tries to follow her, but he is refused entry as his constant border hopping has made the Government suspicious. His desperate and reckless efforts to get in as a spy for the British fails and land him in prison, with hope of release only coming from Zula, but their journey to self destructive passion across the divides only intensifies. Beautifully acted with a fabulous soundtrack, that moves through the changing music of the ages. We see traditional folk song giving way to regimented controlled disciplined music, the decadence of free form jazz and the wild freedsom of the rock & roll era where Zula dances on the bar to Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock. The film also allows the characters to age when so many films set over several decades keep the actors looking as young as ever. In a late scene where Zula is rediscovered playing in a Mexican jazz band, her wig slips and her make up runs to reveal the older self she has struggled to conceal under a great deal of pretence. A sad, sometimes surreal movie. In one scene, Zula leaps into the river in an apparent Ophelia style drowning scene, singing as the current draws her downstream but she is later seen dry and sitting by a fire to warm herself up. A sequence when the singers perform as a giant poster of Stalin rises up in the theatre behind them to show the imposition of state control over the free happy sounds of the people's hearts is chilling. Youtube trailer for the movie Arthur Chappell