Pawel Pawlikowski’s continent-spanning romantic tragedy Cold War made its world premiere last May, in the early days of the Cannes film festival. Cannes is the type of festival where an early premiere berth can mean a film gets forgotten by the end of the 10 days.
But in the case of Cold War, it was a boon: For the rest of the festival’s run, as people stood around in lines and at parties talking about the films they’d seen and liked, someone would say “Oh, and I loved Cold War,” and everyone nearby would enthusiastically agree.
It’s a gorgeously crafted film, with strong performances from its two beautiful leads, Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot, who play musicians named Zula and Wiktor in a tempestuous, lifelong romance that carries them across post-war Europe. And its music and sultry black-and-white cinematography are infectious.
Pawlikowski is no stranger to praise. His 2014 film Ida garnered universal acclaim, and his earlier films like 2004’s My Summer of Love introduced his work to English-speaking audiences (and to a young Emily Blunt).
Pawlikowski is Polish, born in Warsaw under Communist rule, and he loosely based Zula and Wiktor’s story on that of his own parents. One recent afternoon in Manhattan, he and I spoke about the film, his parents’ story, and the kind of love story he told in Cold War. Our conversation, lightly edited and condensed, is below.
Alissa Wilkinson
This film is set in post-war Europe, and it’s partly based on your own parents, right?
Pawel Pawlikowski
It’s very much to do with my parents — the world they lived in that kind of shaped them, tripped them up. But it’s also about two people who are very strong individuals, and very attractive.
My father was an old-fashioned guy who said a woman has to fit in, and my mother just didn’t at all. Their story had betrayal, and separations, getting together again, having a baby, then divorcing and really falling out horribly, then leaving the country separately. My father escaped. My mom married an English guy in order to leave Poland, with me in tow, when I was 14.
But then my parents met abroad again a couple of years later and fell in love, and decided they wanted to be together. They dumped their spouses and got married, and ended up living together in Germany, in exile. Then they quarreled, and she had an affair with some other guy, much younger. But they ended up together because they were both tired, too tired to fight after 40 years of this stuff.
My mother was a ballerina in the first half of her life and she screwed up her back. She had scoliosis, which she didn’t look after, and then she had three operations that went wrong. She was in corsets, and there was morphine. My father had three heart attacks; he was a heavy smoker and drinker. They were quite young when they died, 57 and 67, but they died together in a not dissimilar fashion to what you see in the film.
Just before they died they were, for two or three years, the happiest couple. They came to realize they had nothing but each other. The countries change. The boyfriends, girlfriends, wives change. Politics change. But they realized that the only thing in the world is her, is him.
It’s the mother of all love stories in a way. But it didn’t seem like a love story throughout. It felt like a really bad marriage. God forbid you have such a love story. You’d rather have just a normal relationship. In this stable place. In one country, ideally.
Alissa Wilkinson
Although, one of the most famous and most often retold love stories of all time is a tragedy, Romeo and Juliet.
Pawel Pawlikowski
Yeah. It’s impossible. [In Romeo and Juliet,] history also got in the way.
This story was with me for a while, and I’d written it out more or less as biography, as their story. But it was just too messy to shape into drama. It took a bit of time before I could turn it into a story of a couple who was kept together not just by the history [they had] together, but by something else — for my parents, a child, and in the movie, music.
In the film, music is what brought them together, because they would never have otherwise. He’s from a different world than her. Much more ... posh isn’t a word for communist Poland, but more educated, more cultured. She was really from the lower depths, in a small town.
Music brought them together. And then something happens — opposites attract, but they connect through music.
Alissa Wilkinson
What struck me the first time I saw Cold War was how much it’s about the ways that different political systems shape Zula and Wiktor as individuals, but also their relationship — how those systems factor into the twists and turns their relationship takes. Living under the Communist regime really affects the way they interact with one another, something you obviously witnessed.
Pawel Pawlikowski
I saw my parents in different contexts. What if suddenly you live in a new country, and you don’t speak the language? You’re much less at home. You’re much less witty, much less sexy, because your confidence, you have to make up for it. You can make up for it by being a bit creepy and trying too hard or being arrogant.
These two scenarios as seen in life — I know them for myself. You change with age. You lose some swagger.
But it’s true. And I chose for [Zula and Wiktor] to live in Paris in the movie, because Paris is the most hermetically bourgeois, educated environment. Everyone’s seen everything, read everything. Everyone has opinions about everything; they go, “Poland? I know about Poland.” So Wiktor is really pissed off in Paris. It’s so “superior.” These salons are just suffocating. It’s torture.
That changes them a bit. But it also changes their relationship, because Zula suddenly loses her respect for him. In Poland, he was mysterious, a stranger, an authority, maybe a genius. In Paris, he’s sucking up to this film/record producer guy, and changes the lyrics of their song. There’s all sorts of reason for her to resent having to be there.
Most lives have stages, but theirs is a very dramatic life.
Alissa Wilkinson
And their paths are always evolving, too.
Pawel Pawlikowski
In the black “holes” of the film between the scenes, when they’re absent from each other — of course this is where the real love occurs. You love this absent object. You kind of build them up into something incredible, which inevitably lets you down.
So this absence is pretty important. Whenever they disappear, the other just gets this kind of absolute urge to rejoin them.
Alissa Wilkinson
What you’re referring to is how the film is structured as a series of discrete sequences, set many years apart from one another, with fades to black in between. That doesn’t feel conventional for European films. Were you tempted at all to fill in the gaps?
Pawel Pawlikowski
No, no. That was the general drift. There are a few more scenes that were in some versions of the script. There’s so many versions that I actually lost track, but there were some more explanatory scenes. …
I knew I was going to be stripping it down, maybe inventing other things that are more suggested and visual, rather than talking and explanatory.
Alissa Wilkinson
Oddly, this approach made me think a little bit of Richard Linklater’s three Before films: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. Like Cold War, those three films are about a conflicted love story, and many years pass between each of them. Because of the large gaps in time, the viewer spends the whole film kind of putting together what transpired in between the moments that are shown onscreen.
Pawel Pawlikowski
Which is great. Yeah, I love that. Of course, it’s also exactly the opposite, because in [the Before films] they just talk all the time [while Cold War involves long stretches of silence]. But that’s the idiom of the film, and it’s lovely, and they really say everything that’s on their minds. Ethan [Hawke] and Julie [Delpy], they really brought their own experiences to the film, and it was great. I love those films, especially the first.
I remember watching Seven Up. Do you remember that documentary series?
Alissa Wilkinson
Yes! [The Up series began in 1964, when a group of 7-year-old British children were the subjects of a documentary about their lives — with particular regard to how class and social conditions affected them. The same group of subjects, give or take a few over the years, has been (re-)visited by a documentary crew multiple times in five decades that have passed since the first film, making a new documentary every seven years.]
Pawel Pawlikowski
First there was the British one, the original. Then there was a Russian one too. They’re so moving to see: this kid became this, and then this. It’s really eerie.
Alissa Wilkinson
The British series has to be up to 63 Up by now, right? [Note: I checked, and 63 Up is scheduled for release in 2019.]
Pawel Pawlikowski
Yeah. They keep doing them. Every life is a disaster.
This film is about that too, but I wanted to make it a beautiful disaster, and kind of slightly transcend the ending. But it’s true if you look at most lives, it’s very unattractive.
Alissa Wilkinson
Life can be weird, too, because you have these moments where people who you thought you left in your past come back. But for Wiktor and Zula, that’s even harder to do, since it means getting across the Iron Curtain.
Pawel Pawlikowski
When history gets in the way, that’s a whole different thing.
But in a way, obstacles actually sometimes make relationships stronger. The strength of the emotion of love is unbelievable in the face of history. Having communication at your disposal all the time actually undermines that muscle. It weakens that heart muscle, having multiple choices for constantly reassuring each other.
Alissa Wilkinson
So there’s a song in Cold War that evolves over time — a folk song that comes to be very meaningful to the story. Can you talk about that a bit, and how music works in the film more broadly?
Pawel Pawlikowski
There was always going to be music, just like there was in Ida. But what helped me to structure the whole film and to bring Zula and Wiktor together was the folk ensemble. I remember the songs from my childhood, and from my mother when she was a ballet dancer. She danced with folk ensembles, too — because it was a job you could do at the time.
Alissa Wilkinson
State-sponsored, right?
Pawel Pawlikowski
Yeah, to spread nationalism. To show that art comes from the people. And also it was free of dangerous opinions — it’s not disturbing in any way. [The state] could smuggle socialist content in. I think the official doctrine of socialist realism, which was binding in 1956, was that art should be folkloric and nationalist in form, and socialist in content.
The music became a good device for me in the film. It helped Zula and Wiktor to do a lot of things: It constructed the narrative, kept them together, gave them a way to cross to the West. Some people would join these state-sponsored folklore ensembles in order to defect once they were in the West. So with Victor, there’s a hint of that: “Okay, this is my ticket out.”
It also gave me the chance to play some beautiful music, but also to play with the music. What these ensembles were doing is kind of “fakelore,” not folklore, so then we could transform the song into something a little bit more choral and choreographed, that they could dance to. And then we could take that same musical material and turn it into jazz.
Music also helped to define Zula and Wiktor’s relationship. They relate to each other through music. There’s always stuff that they have in common that can define where they are in their relationship, and where they are in history as well.
Alissa Wilkinson
Speaking of that: My iPhone wallpaper is actually from the scene in the bar in Paris, when she dances to ...
Pawel Pawlikowski
To “Rock Around the Clock.”
Alissa Wilkinson
At that moment I think I understood their relationship in a different way. For a lot of the film you’re thinking, “Well if they can just get to a place where they can be together, they’ll be happy.” But then something else happens entirely.
Pawel Pawlikowski
Yeah, yeah. And that song drives a wedge. He doesn’t even react to it — he’s so busy creeping up to this intellectual guy, and she’s a bit drunk and a bit bored and suddenly it’s this energy from rock ‘n roll, which in 1957 when the scene is set, is exactly when it hit the world.
It’s like music is the color in a black and white film.
Cold War opens in theaters on December 21.