Cinema highlight "Cold War": A hot and cold love

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Living between two systems can be a curse. In Pawel Pawlikowski's "Cold War" this tears the lovers Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot). Neither in Stalinist Poland nor in French exile does the charismatic singer and her older music teacher find a home.

Or rather, a common home, because one always finds his way better under the new circumstances than the other. Zula knows how to enthuse Polish audiences with folk dances and songs. Wiktor can succeed as a jazz pianist in Paris. Nevertheless, they do not want to be without each other, and in "Cold War" bitter post-war history unfolds as a rousing love drama: the story of two working-class and peasant children who could not come together.

Can it be a blessing to live between two systems? At least Pawel Pawlikowski has not torn it. He was born in Poland in 1957, but at the age of 14, together with his mother, first emigrated to the FRG, then to Great Britain. First shot award-winning documentaries, then feature films. First in English, then in Polish. Became an anti-Polish enemy for his movie "Ida" at home, then celebrated as the first Polish winner of the Overseas Oscar.

DPA

Pavel Pawlikowski at the Oscars 2015

"I was always just about the next film I can do," says the 61-year-old at the interview in Berlin, "and was always in proportion to my options at the time." When he made documentaries, funding was secured through the BBC. "A Golden Age," Pawlikowski says in retrospect. By the time he had finished, he had begun to search for fictional material. "That's what I was able to raise money for, not a lot, but always enough, so there was never a time when I thought: now you're being stopped by something you'd like to do."

In the arms of patrons

The freedom of artists is one of the themes that runs through "Cold War" and beyond the system boundaries. In post-war Poland, Stalinism lays around the necks of Zula and Wiktor like two hands. In the West, on the other hand, they have to throw themselves into the arms of patrons in order to survive. "For me, that's a question of grading: what restrictions apply and when do they become murderous?" Says Pawlikowski. "If you come from a country where you have to pay for your art under certain circumstances with life, a subtle form of restriction is less dramatic, but if you start out with total freedom, they seem a bit drastic Still not circumstances. "

As with the previous film "Ida" Pawlikowski's story can not be reduced to the one thread. Form and content are too virtuoso to interlock, support each other and function as separate stimuli. "I try to make my tracks while filming," says Pawlikowski. "I want to create things that are complicated and true at the same time, a single person can be both an ass and a wonderful person, and I want to portray history as well: that it is complicated and sometimes there is no right or wrong and the same is true for the form, which is at best neither very clear the one nor clearly the other. "

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Like "Ida", who was also nominated for the Camera Oscar, "Cold War" has also been shot in black and white and in a square-like academy format (camera: Lukasz Zal). What might seem like a net in the repetition, however, quickly gains new appeal. The perfectly condensed pictures stand in contrast to the erratic narrative style. In loose episodes, some separated by almost decades, Pawlikowski designs the love of Zula and Wiktor. Epic tragedy is spreading. At the same time, "Cold War" has a running time of only 88 minutes.

Perhaps the secret of Pawlikowski's recent achievements lies in this simultaneity. His films are both artistic and accessible, precise and associative, politically explosive and intoxicatingly beautiful.

Petition against "Ida"

That he had found a kind of recipe for success, was not foreseeable. So "Ida" 2014 launched neither in Cannes nor in Venice, but at the minor London Film Fest. After the film about a novice in Poland in the sixties had won there the main prize, his triumphal march was unstoppable. After more than sixty awards, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film was finally added in February 2015. "On the one hand, it was great to win," says Pawlikowski. "It was the first foreign Oscar for Poland at all, on the other hand, at that time there was an election campaign in Poland and the PiS [today's governing party] tried to fuel the argument with the film."

Because in "Ida" admits a Polish figure to have been involved in the murder of Jews, the film was ostracized as a revisionist. Poland's PiS-friendly anti-defamation league launched a petition requesting that the film be preceded by a statement that Poland was occupied by Germany during the Second World War and that aid to Jews was under severe punishment. Around 50,000 signatures came together online.

With a little time interval Pawlikowski is unimpressed by the instrumentalization. The governing party is extremely conservative and nationalist, trying to bring as much control as possible, the courts, for example, and the public service television, but there is much resistance, and ultimately, resistance it is up to us to change things and choose to go. "

In the video: The trailer for "Cold War"

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New visions

He himself would feel activated by the current developments in Poland, as would many co-directors. "We have no time for nonsense, it's about too much," says Pawlikowski. Agitative art is not to be expected from him. "I try to keep ideology and art apart as much as possible, you just need a lot of leeway to create something that really has a life of its own - when you're shaking your head, what kind of message you send with your movie, who here People will end up hating it, people will always hate it. "

For "Cold War" Pawlikowski proposes so far only love. In Cannes, he was awarded the prize for Best Director. And he also presents the Polish Oscar-filing. Perhaps at least these two, Poland and Pawlikowski, will reunite in the foreseeable future.

"I know that there is an idea that Poland fell into the hands of fascists and now it's all over," says Pawlikowski. "On the other hand, I believe that this is a phase that provides an understandable response to the previous phase, so understandably in the sense of 'understandable', not 'justified', Poland seems to me to be a strong society that has more to offer has as nationalist zeal and inferiority complexes. "

"Cold War - The Latitude of Love" (Distribution: New Visions) will be released on November 22.