I've just seen the movie Cold War, by Paweł Pawlikowski, which develops the passionate yet fractured love story of a pianist-composer and a folk-singer through the background of the Cold War in the 1950s.
Screened in 4:3 monochrome, every framing by cinematographer Łukasz Żal is sumptuous and could easily translate into first rate stills shots too. The soundtrack uses a mix of folk, classic, showy tunes, jazz and emergent rock-and-roll as a backdrop within the evolving story.
The photogenic Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is attracted to one of his new auditions: the fringe-haired blonde teenager Zula (Joanna Kulig). Their story develops as Wiktor's (previous love?) producer Irena (Agata Kulesza) falls to the wayside. Together Wiktor's group of singers must portray a diplomacy-laden rethink of Polish folk tunes for elite theatre goers, increasingly across Europe.
We see the story move from Poland to Berlin, then to Paris and beyond. It's a haunting movie, packed with individual moments of bitter sweet clarity and deliberately directed with quite distinct gaps to be filled by the viewer.
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