Female Film Critics 24/375
Oppressive political policies often come most alive when embedded in strong personal stories. That’s the case in writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War. In 1949 Poland, three workers travel the countryside in a van collecting folk music on audiotape all in honor of the nation. A favored few singers and dancers will be chosen to represent their People’s culture.
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Four years after winning an Oscar for best-foreign-language film for Ida, author and director Pawel Pawlikowski has returned with three-time Oscar-nominated Cold War, a meticulously composed story of love shattered by the Iron Curtain, and temperaments. It will break your heart, but never mind: despair has never looked so gorgeous.
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This visually stunning, formally immaculate, and darkly romantic film, Pawel Pawlikowski (Academy award-winner “Ida“) sets a story of star-crossed lovers against the turmoil of post-war Europe. Like other auteurs this season — think Alfonso Cuaron and “Roma” — Pawlikowski lends an epic grandeur to an intimate tale inspired by the lives of his parents. With awards time upon us, Cold War will surely be in the conversation.
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Cold War is blurbed as a romance, but the title refers as much to the plot as to the political and temporal setting of Pawel Pawlikovski‘s haunting film. It begins in 1949, two years after a communist government came to power in the Polish People’s Republic. Ethnomusicologists are roaming the land, auditioning for people’s choruses to celebrate Poland.
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