Cold War

— “Cold War,” with its black and white aesthetics, gorgeous photography, and director’s attention to every part begs comparison to “Roma” but the two, while both based on memories and associated emotions, tell their tales differently. For “Roma,” the recollections feed from a young boy’s perspective and are more personalized. With “Cold War,” there’s a sense of watching from a less involved viewpoint, but not with less emotion and still dependent on memory. “Cold War” may be a more disciplined film with the story pared down to its bare bones, and scenes, taken as a whole, provide the story, sort of a push and pull of love and life. Set in the Cold War, it looks at a love affair that seems destined to fail, at a time where ideologies and passions help bring a couple together and at the same time, keep them apart. The film’s set during a time when borders between East and West Europe move from porous to impermeable, when ideas of art and culture clash, when passions boil and then are lowered to a simmer. In the end, after all the politics and all the history, the sparks that linked the couple are still there but it’s hard not to wonder if the shifts from repression to freedom, and from fear to hope, weren’t necessary ingredients to keep the spark alive, to take the couple to a place where their relationship was what remained to hold on to. However you interpret the relationship, it’s told with such care that this is one of the best films of 2018.

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[2018. 89 min. Written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Starring Joanna Kulig, Tomas Kot, Borys Szyc, and Agata Kulesza.]
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/cold-war-2018