Hot love during the 'Cold War'

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski follows Ida with a love story set against a political backdrop.

If there were no other reason to see Cold War, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's follow-up to his Academy Award-winning Ida, you could find a compelling one in the person of Joanna Kulig, an actress whose energy and sensuality seem nearly uncontainable on screen. In Cold War, Kulig portrays a singer who puts her talents to the service of the Soviet-occupied Polish bureaucracy during the 1950s.

Good as she is, Kulig is far from the only reason to see Cold War, a story of ill-fated love that subtly blends politics, history and personal drama into a powerful story about people who aren't entirely in control of their destinies.

Pawlikowski deftly charts the bumpy relationship between Kulig's Zula and Wiktor, an equally good Tomasz Kot. A pianist who defects to the West, Wiktor hopes that Zula will follow. She doesn't.

In this impossible situation, a powerful but stammering, 15-year love affair gives the movie its emotional weight. Pawlikowski, who says he modeled the movie after the tempestuous relationship between his mother and father, follows Wiktor and Zula whose lives diverge -- but never entirely separate.

After his defection, Wiktor plays jazz piano and languishes in Paris. Zula pursues her career behind the Iron Curtain, sometimes visiting Wiktor to reignite the spark of a relationship that never really loses its charge.

Again working black-and-white, Pawlikowski begins the movie in 1949 when Wiktor and Zula first meet. Wiktor and an associate (Agata Kulesza) are touring rural Poland in search of authentic folk music. They audition locals and try to deal with the party boss (Borys Szyc) who has been assigned the task of ensuring that the troupe upholds the best Slavic virtues; i.e., a blond purity that excludes the country's various ethnicities.

As soon as Wiktor sees Zula, he's smitten. She may not be the most talented of the troupe's prospective members, but she has a quality that sets her apart from the rest. They begin an affair, which Zula hopes to sustain even though she's informing on Wiktor to the troupe's Communist boss. Business, after all, is business. Why should Wiktor be upset?

In 1951, when the company begins its tour, it becomes clear that Stalinesque priorities are going to dominate. Wiktor knows that he must move westward. By then, Zula has been caught up in an eastern version of stardom. She opts for career over love.

But that description sells her a bit short. Zula is one of those big-screen women who simply refuse to be tagged with a label.

For his part, Kot -- the corners of his mouth turned upward -- beautifully conveys the dilemma of a man who chooses the freedom of the West but can't really find his footing in a new world.

When Wiktor and Zula spend some sustained time with each other in Paris, things don't go well. It sounds like a cliche, but these truly are lovers who can't live with each other and can't live without each other.

A word about the movie's length. Pawlikowski keeps the story to 88 minutes, shooting scenes in the "Academy ratio," the aspect ratio that once defined all film and which suggests the classical outlines of Pawlikowski's story.

I mention the movie's economy of length only to suggest that it doesn't take two hours and 10 minutes, the running time of many American features, to tell a complicated, emotionally involving story. Hollywood take note.

Nuns victimized by war

"All's well that end's well."

You may want to put that well-worn bromide aside after watching The Innocents, a drama about life in an austere Polish nunnery in 1945.

French director Anne Fontaine gives her movie an optimistic finale, but it goes against the grain of what has been an appropriately disturbing look at the lingering impacts of war.

Seen mostly through the eyes of a French doctor (Lou de Laage), The Innocents tells the story of nuns whose faith has been shaken by brutal war-time realities. Marauding Russian soldiers not only put Hitler's troops on the run; they raped most of the nuns, leaving many of them pregnant.

A few of these cloistered women had had worldly experiences prior to entering the convent; many were virgins whose commitment to being unsullied brides of Christ was a cornerstone of their lives.

The gifted Polish actress Agata Kulesza, last seen playing "Red" Wanda in Ida, portrays the Reverend Mother who runs the convent. The Reverend Mother worries that if word about the pregnancies leaks to the surrounding community, the convent's reputation will be irrevocably compromised.

Agata Buzek portrays the Reverend Mother's second in command, a woman had experience with men before entering the convent, and who seems more compassionate than the Reverend Mother about the suffering of her sisters.

Most of the movie involves the ways in which de Laage's character tries to help the nuns, who know little about giving birth -- or anything else for that matter. Some of the nuns are so unworldly, they don't even know that they're pregnant.

De Laage's Mathilde Beaulieu does not share the faith of the nuns, but empathizes with them as women in need of assistance. She's also having a somewhat perfunctory affair with a Jewish physician (Vincent Macaigne) who also has been stationed at the post-war Polish front. She eventually enlists his help in giving birth to the babies.

In deliberate and piercing fashion, Fontaine allows moral questions to emerge; the characters must grapple with them as best they can. There are no easy answers, and Fontaine doesn't try to manufacture any.

So back to my opening remarks. Though based on actual events, the movie offers an ending that feels too encouraging for a drama that has been so grimly focused -- or maybe the ending arrives too abruptly to feel like anything more than an add-on meant to discourage complete pessimism.

Whatever the reason, Fontaine's attempt provide a moment of redemption proves less convincing than her portrayal of the horrors that preceded it.

Those horrors serve as a necessary reminder that the terrors of war don't end when the shooting stops and that responsibility for dealing with them are burdens that many are forced to carry.