Could there possibly be a more overworked, banal question of the cultural moment than “What’s your passion?” It’s so ubiquitous, from job interviews to dating apps, that it has supplanted the equally risible “What’s your sign?”—as if anyone could instantly recognize real passion in a society as corporatized, monetized, and intimacy averse as ours. (As pervasive as social media is, sharing everything with everyone is the opposite of intimate, which means private and personal.) Actual passion is incendiary, all-consuming, nonconformist, and frequently antisocial; it can be visionary, as in the arts, or self-destructive, as in l’amour fou, mad love. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest film, Cold War, chronicles—stopping just short of celebrating—one such crazy love, an affair that blazes across a postwar European landscape already strewn with too many ashes, and grimly divided by the Iron Curtain and closing borders.
That, of course, is not how Hollywood makes movies, where a script needs to be final before shooting begins or else the project risks budget overruns. That’s also why few American movies from 2018 are as strong or innovative as Cold War, which also incorporates a half-dozen lacunae between chapters, gaps in the years between Zula and Wiktor’s sojourns across Poland, East Berlin, Paris, Yugoslavia, then back to Paris and Poland again. Because Pawlikowski relishes ambiguity, he expects the viewer to fill in the blanks and imagine what happened offscreen. He claims his inspiration was Michael Apted’s Up series of documentaries, beginning with Seven Up! (1964), for which Apted interviewed a number of British schoolchildren, then returned to record them every seven years thereafter to track how they’d grown and how society had changed.
In Polish with subtitles. R, 88 min. Fri 1/18-Thu 1/24: 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:15 PM. Music Box Theatre.
