Submitted by Poland: Cold War

Death is not the natural enemy of love—ideology is. Academy Award-winning auteur Pawel Pawlikowski understands that better than anyone. He saw how exile, separation, and transience took a toll on his Polish defector parents, but it never quelled their mutual ardor. Their story inspired the perfectly yet tragically matched lovers in Pawlikowski’s Cold War (trailer here), Poland’s official foreign language Academy submission, which opens this Friday at Film Forum.

Neither Wiktor or Zula is all that interested in folk music, but they both see Mazurek, a traditional dance troupe, as a vehicle to help them get what they want. For the classically-trained, Western-influenced Wiktor, it is a chance to travel and possibly escape, whereas Zula merely sees it as a means of avoiding her abusive father. However, they share an immediate connection that only becomes more potent and passionate over time.

Right from the start, their romance is a rocky one, especially when Zula confesses she agreed to inform on Witkor as part of her terms of employment. Inevitably, they agree to defect one fateful night in pre-Wall East Berlin. However, Witkor slips across alone when Zula fails to met him at the designated time. By doing so, he becomes an enemy of the state, but that will not be enough to halt their romance.

Thus, begins a long, agonizing period of hasty meetings, unsatisfying encounters, assorted defections, and costly repatriations. Cold War is only a mere 89 minutes, but it tells an epic, decade-spanning story. Frankly, it could be considered a 21^st Century Doctor Zhivago, chronicling an intimate love story against the sweeping backdrop of historical chaos and oppression, but Pawlikowski does it all with elegant narrative economy—and jazz.

Music is important to this love story, starting with Mazurek’s choral performances, but fully blossoming with the hardbop-style jazz Witkor plays in Paris and the torchy LP he tries to produce for Zula. It all sounds perfectly era appropriate and in the case of the jazz, smoky and swinging, thanks to Marcin Masecki’s arrangements and piano stylings. It really helps us understand the depth of his feelings and the melancholy of his blues.

Tomasz Kot also seems very attuned to the music as he broods, yearns, and chafes under authority. As Wiktor, he raises world weariness to a high art form. The romantic rapport he forges with Joanna Kulig’s Zula is palpable and often quite painful to witness. Kulig melts microphones with her sultry vocals and rivets viewers with the sensitivity and brittleness of her performance. It is no exaggeration to say they represent one of the finest on-screen pairings of the post-millennium era.

The design team faithfully recreates the mean cruddiness of Communist Poland and East Berlin, but Lukasz Zal makes it all look strikingly beautiful with his award-worthy black-and-white cinematography. Every frame of every shot is truly a work of art. In terms of technical craftsmanship, Cold War could well be the strongest film of the year, but it also connects on a deeply emotional level.

There are many good reasons Cold War dominated the European Film Awards. It is easily the best looking and sounding narrative film of the year. In fact, it is the best of the year, even eclipsing Never Look Away. Very highly recommended, Cold War opens this Friday (12/21) in New York, at Film Forum.

Ida: A Novitiate Nun in Communist Poland

In Communist Poland, a vow of poverty hardly mattered. For one nun in training, the most challenging part of her novitiate will be meeting her sole living relative. It leads to some profound soul searching in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Convent life is all Anna has ever known. Orphaned as an infant, the young woman will soon take her vows, but the mother superior insists she first visit her aunt Wanda. Neither has been pining to meet the other, in part because of what they represent. While Anna identifies with Poland’s strong Catholic tradition, Wanda is a notorious Stalinist era prosecutor and judge. “Red Wanda” as she is known, now lives a boozy, solitary existence, only occasionally relieved by brief “carnal” distractions. When Anna arrives unannounced, Red Wanda reveals the young woman’s true identity, almost as an act of hostility. Anna was actually born Ida Lebenstern to Jewish parents who perished during the war.

Despite her abrasive welcome, Red Wanda quickly warms to her niece, agreeing to set out with her in search of her parents’ remains. It will be a rather tricky task, given their sketchy information. Simultaneously, Red Wanda does her best to play Anna’s devil-on-the-shoulder, trying to convince her to sample some of life’s more adult pleasures before she completely renounces the secular world.

Ida might be opening May 2^nd (the day after May Day), but audience members should take a heavy coat to the theater, because it is one of the chilliest films you will ever see. 1962 was a relatively stable period for Communist Poland (compared to the subsequent anti-Semitic campaign and imposition of martial law), but it was still a time of scarcity and drabness. Nonetheless, jazz was on the upswing with the smart set and not yet explicitly on the outs with the authorities. It just so happens, Lis, a talented saxophonist gigging at their provincial hotel, attracts Wanda’s leering stare and the awkwardly demur notice of her niece.

Arriving on the heels of Władsław Pasikowski’s more confrontational Aftermath, Ida is clearly part of Poland’s continuing effort to process the national WWII experience, long deferred during the Communist era. However, this is a more personal meditation on identity and family. It is also unusually beautiful, in a severe, ascetic way. Ryszard Lenczewski & Lukasz Zal’s black-and-white cinematography is absolutely arresting, while Pawlikowski strikingly composes each shot, dwarfing his figures against imposing backdrops.

Acting within such a frame is quite a challenge, but newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska seems to grow along with her character, Anna/Ida, as the film progresses. Without question though, Agata Kulesza’s Red Wanda is the most successful breaking out of Pawlikowski’s frozen tableaux with her sharp elbows and razor-like tongue. Dawid Orognik also shows flashes of presence as Lis, while Joanna Kulig briefly catches the eye and ear as Lis’s band singer.

The British-based Pawlikowski makes a bold statement with his first Polish production, aesthetically and thematically. His deliberate pace and dark vision will limit Ida’s appeal even within arthouse circles, but it is an ambitious work of auteur level cinema. Recommended for disciplined cineastes, Ida opens this Friday (5/2) in New York at Film Forum.

Pawlikowski’s Woman in the Fifth

Tom Ricks is a writer, so he must be a little off.  With only one obscure novel to his name, the American cuts an underwhelming literary figure, but he has enough issues to earn a restraining order from his French wife.  Following her and their daughter to Paris does little for his overwrought state of mind in Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Less than thrilled to see him, Nathalie Ricks promptly calls in the gendarmerie.  Beating a hasty retreat, Ricks finds himself penniless at the flop-house motel run by gangster Sezer.  To pay for his room and board, the novelist accepts a job working as a sketchy subterranean watchman for one of Sezer’s criminal endeavors.  He figures it will give him time to work, but his writing is definitely not of the healthy variety.  The only bright spot are his semi-regular assignations with Margit Kadar, an elegant and alluring widow of a Hungarian novelist perhaps even more obscure than Ricks, living in Paris’s 5^th arrondissement.

While his ex shuns his reconciliation attempts, Ricks attracts the romantic attention of Ania, the Polish immigrant waitress at Sezer’s tavern, who also happens to be the mobster’s lover.  This profoundly destabilizes the novelist’s situation.  It also starts a chain of events leading Ricks to suspect a hitherto unknown force is meddling in his affairs.

Based on the novel by Douglas Kennedy, Fifth blends elements of genre cinema in ways that would be spoilery to discuss in detail.  However, Pawlikowski is more interested in presenting an extreme psychological study with a distinctly Continental art film sensibility than aiming for mere thrills or chills.  Never rushing the revelations, Pawlikowski still deftly creates sense that all is not right with his protagonist and his world.

Leading a multinational ensemble, Ethan Hawke and his terrible French accent are effectively moody and withdrawn as the socially problematic Ricks.  Polish actress Joanna Kulig, recently seen (and very much exposed) in Malgoska Szumowska’s Elles, is also quite credible as the glammed-down Ania.  Yet, Kristin Scott Thomas is the crucial piece of the film’s puzzle.  Always an intelligent presence, she is absolutely perfect cast as the sophisticated Kadar.  The audience instantly shares Ricks’ interest in her—and of course her accent is always flawless, in both French and English.

Fifth’s slow build and emotionally detached approach to Ricks’ existential drama might difficult for some viewers to whole-heartedly embrace.  However, it is a smart, stylish film.  Indeed, cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski’s chilly gray color palette nicely suits the on-screen mystery and alienation.  It is the sort of film viewers will kick around in their heads for days after screening it, which is an increasing rarity.  Highly recommended for fans of European cinema with a dark twist, Woman in the Fifth opens this Friday (6/15) in New York at the Village East.