Cold War tells its love story in leaps across years, each cut to black erasing what happened in between. Paweł Pawlikowski has called this artistic economy. It is also the exact shape of what a son can know about his parents’ marriage.
Poland, 1949. Wiktor discovers Zula at an audition. She sings a borrowed song and lies about where she learned it. He recruits her anyway. The film enters this moment completely: his gaze, her performance, the precise quality of the wanting.
East Berlin, 1952. Wiktor waits at the crossing point. Zula doesn’t come. He walks alone into the West.
[Cut to black.]
What happened to Zula in the years between those two moments is not in this film. She was coerced into informing on Wiktor, revealed nothing that could harm him, and stayed in Poland while he escaped. The film gives us the fact of this but not the experience of it. We do not live inside the years she spent performing for a state that owned her, married to men she didn’t want, surviving the country Wiktor had the privilege to leave. The cut to black swallows her.
Paris, 1954. They meet again in a jazz club. He asks why she didn’t come. She says she wasn’t sure she’d be good enough in France, that she didn’t know the language. He nods. The film moves on.
[Cut to black.]
Yugoslavia, 1955. Wiktor sits in the audience at one of the troupe’s performances. Zula sees him from the stage and becomes visibly shaken. The police detain him after the show and put him on a train back to France.
[Cut to black.]
Paris, 1957. She arrives. She has married an Italian to get a visa. “Now I’m yours,” she tells him. “Forever and ever.”
Everything between those cards belongs to Zula, and the film cannot enter it.
Cold War (2018) won the Best Director prize at Cannes, earned three Academy Award nominations, and is, by any reasonable measure, one of the great European films of the decade. Paweł Pawlikowski, working again with cinematographer Łukasz Żal and the same Academy-ratio black-and-white grammar he used in Ida, compresses his parents’ forty-year love story into eighty-eight minutes across fifteen years, using cuts to black between title cards to leap across what the film cannot accommodate. Joanna Kulig’s Zula is a career-defining performance: volcanic, funny, heartbreaking, impossible to look away from. The Sight & Sound critic Jonathan Romney called her “a one-woman cultural revolution, the face of a Europe — bloody but breathing.” That is not hyperbole. She is that good.
Wiktor is played by Tomasz Kot with a simmering, aristocratic restraint — he is the film’s anchor, its still point, the figure whose psychology the film can follow. Zula is the film’s energy, its force of nature, the figure the film cannot stop watching and cannot fully enter. This is the distinction the film does not notice it is making.
| Director | Paweł Pawlikowski |
|---|---|
| Year | 2018 |
| Runtime | 88 minutes |
| Cast | Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, Agata Kulesza |
| Awards | Cannes Best Director; three Academy Award nominations; European Film Awards Best Film |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel, MUBI |
Pawlikowski has been entirely open about the film’s origins. He kept his parents’ real names — Wiktor and Zula — but changed other details. His father was a doctor; Wiktor is a pianist. The forty years became fifteen, so the same actors could carry the whole story. And his mother was seventeen when they met. He aged her up to her mid-twenties. “So we didn’t have to use different actors at the beginning and at the end,” he has explained. This is a reasonable logistical solution to a production problem. It is also the specific adjustment that transforms the story from a complicated one into a romantic one. A seventeen-year-old girl discovered by an older male musician who holds the power to advance or destroy her career, recruited into an ensemble he controls, then drawn into an affair: that is a different story. The film we see — Zula in her mid-twenties, already fully formed, a force of nature who matched Wiktor from the moment she walked into his audition — is the story that allows the romance to read as romance between near-equals. The age adjustment is not dishonest. But it is the choice that flatters the version of events a son could most comfortably tell.
The film’s ellipsis structure — the cut to black, the jump of years, the new title card — is almost universally praised as artistic economy. Watch what it economizes. Every cut to black is a door closing on Zula’s experience without Wiktor. The film enters her life only when she enters his frame.
This is where the parallel with Ida sharpens and diverges. In the previous review in this sequence, we argued that Ida‘s framing — characters pressed into the bottom third, the sky’s weight above them — performs the film’s argument about history pressing down. Ida‘s cuts to black are about historical silence: what Poland cannot say, what the dead cannot testify to. Cold War‘s cuts to black use identical formal grammar and mean something structurally different. They are not historical silence. They are the gaps in a specific person’s knowledge. Pawlikowski has said: “I didn’t know if I could tell it the way I wanted to.” It was Alejandro González Iñárritu, after seeing an early version, who pushed him to finish it. The film Pawlikowski wanted to tell is the film a son could know. Wiktor’s defection to Paris, his jazz club, his French lovers, his longing for Zula: these are scenes a child could have been told about, could have absorbed, could reconstruct from the male side of the marriage. The years Zula spent in Poland alone, surviving the Stalinist apparatus that owned her, performing her authenticity under state surveillance, marrying men she didn’t love as legal instruments to cross borders: these are the years that fall into the black.
The second thing the film cannot see is what Zula’s coercion reveals about the relationship’s foundation. Early in the film, Kaczmarek pressures all the women in the ensemble to report on Wiktor. Zula complies in form and protects him in substance — she reports nothing incriminating. When Wiktor discovers this, in a scene in a summer field, he barely registers what she has just told him about her own position: that she was coerced, that she was surveilled alongside him, that the apparatus had specifically weaponised her proximity to him. What Wiktor hears is the question of what she reported. What the film hears is what Wiktor hears. The scene that should reveal Zula’s extraordinary act of protection — informing under coercion, giving nothing, taking the risk of both compliance and betrayal — is processed entirely through Wiktor’s concern for his own safety. The camera stays with him. Zula’s courage becomes a data point in Wiktor’s story.
Joanna Kulig is the film’s great counter-argument to all of this. What she brings to Zula that the screenplay cannot provide — a full and ungovernable interior, the sense of a woman whose years in the film’s black gaps have left marks the film hasn’t shown us — is felt in every scene she survives. The nightclub sequence, in which she erupts into dancing to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” while a disappointed Wiktor watches from the table, is the film’s most honest moment: Zula asserting the self the film cannot narrate, making herself visible in the only register available to her, the physical and the musical, because the interior is not on offer. She is dancing in the gap.
The film the son made is extraordinary. The film Zula could have made — the forty years from her side, the Poland she endured while Wiktor lived in Paris, the cost of every border crossing, every marriage of convenience, every year the film skips in its clean cut to black — that film does not exist. Pawlikowski knows he could only tell the version he could know. He is honest about this. What the film cannot see is that calling it a love story about two people, rather than a love story told from inside one of them, obscures which of the two the cuts to black actually belong to.
They die together at the end, in an abandoned church in rural Poland, the same countryside where they met. The final shot looks out from the church at the landscape they have chosen to leave in. It is very beautiful, and it is entirely theirs. For once, the film gives Zula the frame on equal terms. She chose this ending with him. That part, at least, no one could doubt.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013): the companion film in every formal sense — same ratio, same grammar, same Polish landscape under its weight of history — but where Cold War is structured around a son’s knowledge of his parents, Ida is about the gap between a young woman and the history she was born into; our review is here.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019): a film that sets out to construct a gaze of genuine equality between its two subjects and then must reckon with the fact that one of them holds the brush; as we argued in that review, the film that declares itself free of the possessive look cannot quite surrender it, and the comparison with Cold War‘s own blind spot about whose experience organises the frame is precise and uncomfortable.
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