Zula, smart and gifted, lands a star spot in the troupe. It is also rumored that she killed her father. (Later, she clears up the misconception, asserting that he’s not dead: “He mistook me for my mother, so I used a knife to show him the difference.”) And she has designs on Wiktor from the start, perhaps because she cannily sees him as an excellent rung on the ladder up and out of dismal country life—or maybe because she is truly falling in love with him. The truth, as it so often is, is probably a mingling of reasons. Wiktor has a face that’s half city gentleman, half bruised-up boxer. No wonder Zula’s eyes are full of him, and vice versa. The camera loves the two of them passionately, separately and together.

Once you know the real story that inspired Cold War, it’s easy to understand why the filmmaker, as well as his camera, idealizes these two restless, complicated souls, seducing us into loving them as he does. With the film, Pawlikowski is presenting a version of his own parents’ volatile, on-again, off-again forty-year relationship; the movie is dedicated to them, though it’s more about the spirit of their connection than it is a strict re-creation. “It’s the ghost of my parents, in a way, of their complicated relationship,” Pawlikowski said in a 2018 interview.



His parents met in 1948. His mother had run away from home to become a ballerina, though she came from a middle-class Polish family, not a depressed rural village. His father was studying to be a medic—Pawlikowski wrote the character of Wiktor as a pianist and conductor, as a way of adding the dynamics of music to the story. The director’s parents repeatedly split and reunited during the first ten years of their relationship. Pawlikowski, their only child, was born during one of those reconciliations, in 1957, and grew up in Warsaw. In 1968, his parents divorced, only to reunite years later in Germany, when both were married to other people. They divorced their respective spouses and remarried. Both died in 1989—still together—just before the Berlin Wall came down.

“In the end, with all of these changing landscapes, and politics, and people, they just had each other,” Pawlikowski said in another interview. “They ended up living together in Munich, too tired to fight, and very ill. So in the end, they were just kind of like a doddering old couple, but totally in love with each other, and holding hands. They were just the most tender, touching couple. Again, knowing that there’s nothing in the world more precious, or important, or stable than each other.”



Pawlikowski thought about, and lived with, his parents’ story for years before he even thought of using it as a springboard for a movie. After their deaths, he has said, “their absence started being very present in my life. And I thought, What an amazing couple! And a disastrous couple.”

The film’s Wiktor and Zula are similarly disastrous—and amazing. Their story unfolds over just fifteen years, and it is bittersweet in its own wildflower way. As the folk troupe grows more and more successful, Wiktor becomes increasingly distressed by the government’s efforts to control the content of its songs and performances. He devises a plan: he and Zula will escape to the West—to Paris—via Berlin, at the time still an open city. But the two are separated, then reunited, then separated again, over and over, sometimes for geopolitical reasons and sometimes for deeply personal ones. Music is with them every minute, even when it’s silent. It brings them together, mostly, though it also breaks them apart: a version of that mournful country love ballad, with new words written by Wiktor’s poet ex-lover, inflames Zula’s jealousy and forces one of the couple’s deepest rifts. From song to song and from country to country, they fight, they betray, they cling to each other like abandoned orphans. Berlin, Paris, Warsaw: no city can hold them together for long, though the borders imposed by communism aren’t necessarily more rigid than the ones they draw for themselves with their quarreling, their jealousies, their resentments.

And if life in the Eastern Bloc was generally filled with hardships, in some ways the most completely Western city, Paris, is the cruelest for the two lovers. It’s there that Wiktor, abandoned by Zula, makes a life for himself as a musician, spending time with a sophisticated and suitably blasé poet (played by Jeanne Balibar). He’s doing okay—he’s in Paris, after all—yet his face and bearing, so composed on the surface, seem haunted, suggesting he has tried, with no success, to harden himself against Zula. And then she appears, almost mystically, as if summoned by the gods from the Paris grisaille.



It has been years since he has seen her. The schoolgirl fringe, the messy single braid are gone. She wears a dark coat and heels, a new uniform for a new adult life, one that Wiktor doesn’t share. He stares at her from the other side of a café table. He asks her if she’s with someone; she asks him the same. The answer for both is yes. Wiktor is the first to pose the essential question: “So, are you happy?” She answers him by not answering.

