Cold War

I wrote a paper about the actual Cold War in Utah for a senior seminar History class in college. While researching that conflict, I kept running into the term “detente.” My dad always told me that I was a practitioner of this idea whenever he’d tell me something and then I’d go check with mom to see if he was right. He’d say, “that’s detente: trust, but verify.”

As I researched further, the idea of detente and the Cold War itself began to change. I saw that each side needed the other to pose a threat to justify the money that they were spending. Everything they manufactured, constructed, and put into operation became a part of a big diplomatic dance that happened in waves of armament and disarmament. Mutually assured destruction (M.A.D. – the most apt acronym of them all) was based around the US and USSR alternatively working together then splitting, then repeating the process over again.

The characters in Cold War remind me of this notion. They need each other to exist and yet sometimes they can’t stand to be in the same space together – one look and their lives are rent asunder, only for them to pick up the pieces again later and try again. They define their boundaries, cross over them and start battles, count their losses and lick their wounds, then redraw the lines again in moving forward.

Zula and Wiktor are the archetypes of classical romance: they believe that their love is heaven ordained, ingrained in the fate of the very world that moves past them while they’re together. They’re not trying to reach a set destination, some traditional goal of a home and family. They take what they can when they can, make it work in their own way, and split when things take a turn. I admire their eternal optimism in themselves as a couple; their forward-looking positivity is never more evinced than in Zula’s final lines: “Let’s go to the other side…the view will be better there.”

Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that “black and white is an actor’s best friend.” This statement is proven true by Cold War. The cinematography reminded me of the old black and white films of the thirties, movies like My Man Godfrey (I loved the way the light would catch Carole Lombard’s dress in that film and send light twinkling across the screen). Pawlikowski uses extreme whites and dark shadows to denote life and it’s absence – musical scenes are well lit, showing how important it is to the characters, while the characters share their dialogues in shadow, showing that their words are inadequate in expressing what they want to say. The grays are the most valuable however: they show life in all its beautiful compromises.

I loved the film and its structure reminded me of Vivre Sa Vie, another film with a classically doomed protagonist. Which reminds me: Anna Karina is dead, long live Anna Karina!