Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2018) (Patreon)

Practically from the jump, there was no question that Cold War was one of the best directed and (perhaps even more to the point) best edited films I'd seen this year. From shot to shot, the film just seemed to snap together like parts of a puzzle. As I noticed this phenomenon, I looked closer, and lo and behold, Pawlikowski's "secret" was the employment of old school Soviet style montage. Granted, there is nothing in Cold War as aggressive as Eisenstein's "Odessa Steps" sequence from Potemkin, or the horse-and-railway intensive "Russia awakens" montage from the first part of Vertov's The Man With the Movie Camera. What Pawlikowski does is far more subtle, but you can observe it if you look.

Soviet montage is based on dialectics, the collision of opposites. So in terms of editing, if one shot is a close-up, the next one is very likely to be a long shot. If a shot is composed on a straightforward horizontal axis, the next one will probably be canted, organized on the diagonal. If you have a two-shot, next you are going to have a crowd. First an exterior, then an interior. First moving, then static. Et cetera. Cold War is not absolutely scrupulous about this, but if you watch, you will see that, from shot to shot, there is a great deal of difference, an attempt to keep the visual field off-kilter and disruptive, to create a general sense of propulsion.

Now, at first, I thought that this was just a nifty gimmick. Here's a film about the Soviet Bloc, and Pawlikowski is going to partially ape the dominant filmmaking style of Socialist Modernism. But this wouldn't actually make much thematic sense. By the time World War II is over and Poland has fallen behind the Iron Curtain, montage cinema was finished. Stalinist Realism (so-called "boy meets tractor" films) was the order of the day.

But what the style of Cold War does accomplish, on its own terms, is to make the film, and the history it depicts, pretty much hurtle by. I was startled at the brevity of individual sequences depicting certain years and locales. No sooner had a set of social relations been established than we are treated to a quick fade-out and another title card with a new time and place. 

What this does for our viewership is to make historical time the dominant force of the film, to gesture outward toward some external force -- the engine of History, in Marxist terms -- that is driving the film well beyond the ken of human agency. Or, if humans are indeed making this History, it is not being made by the romantic couple at the center of Cold War. One of the cardinal rules of conventional cinema is that we are supposed to identity, to a greater or lesser extent, with the protagonists. But who exactly are Wiktor and Zula?

Mike D'Angelo has astutely observed that theirs is a relationship the flourishes only in the face of obstacles. Once they are in Paris, with total freedom, the thrill is gone, and this leads them both to make unconscionably stupid mistakes. But I would contend that they are a kind of "dummy couple" from the get-go. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is a kind of chiseled cipher, and Zula (Joanna Kulig) is, as we see in Paris and afterward, immanently malleable. 

We are shown a physical attraction between the two, and an inkling that they might share something more on the basis of a love for music. But neither of them seems to have passionate views on their art. They are competent, and enjoy making it, but have none of the creative convictions of, say, Irena (Agata Kulesza). Their only real conviction is each other. And aside from the brute fact of it, we really don't know why.

There's a reason Pawlikowski titled his film Cold War instead of, say, The Starcrossed Lovers or The Love No Gulag Could Hold or something equally melodramatic. One might be tempted to think that the Cold War is some kind of metaphor for the relationship between Zula and Wiktor, but I actually think it's far simpler than that. The film is signalling to us what is actually important, which is the backdrop, not the figures in the foreground. Of course, we all know that when Bogie tells Ingrid Bergman that "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans," we're supposed to understand that he's both right and wrong. Cold War, it seems, takes a different position. In the midst of great changes, of great brutality and death, romantic love may actually be rather trivial and stupid.