Zimna Wojna (OmeU)

Musician Wiktor meets and falls in love with the fiery and talented singer Zula at an official Polish folk music school in 1949. When, on tour, Wiktor defects to West Germany, Zula does not join him. By the early 1960s, their tangled relationship has crossed several other countries, including Yugoslavia, and France in its jazz era. Pawlikowski’s follow-up to IDA (2013), again set partly in his native Poland, is a tale of love – indeed, of amour fou – set against the changing tides of communist and capitalist societies. The “cold war” indicated by the title is not only a historical epoch, but a state of perpetual, sombre non-alignment between Zula and Wiktor: they are rarely truly unified in their desires, values, life situations and political a liations – and yet an unquenchable, destructive passion keeps hurling them together. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal sets a finely chiselled, black-and-white style that subliminally affects us through the vast “head room” left above the actors in virtually every scene. Like the films of Jia Zhangke (see ASH IS PUREST WHITE), COLD WAR compares evolving fashions in musical performance (folk, jazz, pop) with the machinations of opposed ideologies. (Adrian Martin)