**/****
written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
by Angelo Muredda Pawel Pawlikowski follows up on the airless perfection of Ida with the ostensibly warmer but equally over-manicured and emotionally distant Cold War, a more historically trenchant La La Land for postwar Poland. Leave it to Pawlikowski, who never met a compelling, age-lined face he didn’t want to frame in an artfully-arranged tableau, to mute even the potentially energizing opening montage of folk performers doing their bits before his ethnographic camera and its onscreen extension, the extended mic of pianist and recruiter Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, whose passing resemblance to Will Forte makes one yearn for the free comic pleasures of MacGruber). Wiktor’s been tasked with putting together a nationalist throwback performance that as another, more committed officer of the state puts it, a bit ironically, should tap into the music of these rural folks’ grandparents–that is to say, a culture “of pain and humiliation.” It’s in that process of, as MacGruber might say, putting together a team, that Wiktor meets his soon-to-be-star-crossed lover Zula (Joanna Kulig), a live-wire who auditions not with a humble song from the fields but a boisterous one from the movies. Zula’s energy, alas, doesn’t do much to raise the film’s own temperature. To be sure, Wiktor and Zula’s sad, state-crossing, decades-spanning affair, modelled after Pawlikowski’s own parents’ romantic history against the backdrop of the iron curtain, is intermittently moving. There is some allure in Cold War‘s elliptical, set-piece-based structure, which leaves its characters in, say, East Berlin only to pick them up in Paris or Yugoslavia years later, either refining their Communist anthems (now for Stalin!), performing in a jazz bar, or composing music for films. And, as expected, the deep black-and-white photography is never less than fetching–the cramped 4:3 frame an ideal if at this point too familiar canvas for a filmmaker who seems to love nothing more than to gently nudge his characters into off-kilter compositions that speak to the way they either come together or fall apart. But as in Ida, for all the effort on display, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this isn’t a little too easy for Pawlikowski, who, despite his personal connection to this material, ultimately delivers a desaturated version of The English Patient‘s more hard-won story of the violence wrought by the arbitrariness of state lines, populated by ciphers named after Mom and Dad. Programme: Special Presentations
