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.

Simple surface, deep undercurrents

The subject of conditions in post-World War II Poland remains fraught with practical and moral issues that are difficult to sort through much less encapsulate in a single story.

By the 1960s, when the new movie Ida takes place, most of the small number of Jews who survived the Holocaust had left Poland. Some who remained had been raised by Catholic families, and didn't even know they were Jewish.

Other Jews tended to see the Soviet occupiers as allies because of Russian opposition to Hitler and because of what they deemed Polish silence in the face of the murderous Nazi onslaught.

Director Pawel Pawlikowski, who was born in Poland, educated in Britain and who now resides in Paris, wades into this morass with a simply presented movie that harbors many complexities.

Pawlikowski (Last Resort and My Summer of Love) tells the story of Ida, an 18-year-old novitiate at an austere Polish convent. Just before Ida is about to take her final vows, her mother superior tells her that she must visit an aunt she didn't know she had.

The aunt, a disaffected judge, tells young Ida who her parents were, and that she's actually Jewish. The drama unfolds from there.

Artful black and white images served up by cinematographers Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski, an old-fashioned aspect ratio that squares those images and carefully considered compositions make Ida one of the least casual movies of the year. Nothing in Ida seems idly expressed.

The movie has been compared to the work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and French director Robert Bresson, but reminded me of some of the work that was coming out of the National Film School in Lodz in the 1960s.

Like Roman Polanski, who trained at Lodz, Pawlikowski tries to advance his story visually, minimizing dialogue and narrative beats: His compositional sense is commanding and slightly off-kilter: He places subjects on the edge or bottom of the frame, often surrounding them with space that practically swallows them.

Young Ida, played by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is a wide-eyed girl who knows nothing of the world. She was sent to the convent as an infant, has no real knowledge of how she got there and has been on track to become a nun for as long as she can remember. She's evidently deeply faithful.

Trzebuchowska has the kind of face that seems open but reveals little. I suppose Pawlikowski wants us to wonder what's happening to Ida internally as she confronts a series of difficult truths.

The brilliant Polish actress Agata Kulesza portrays Ida's aunt Wanda, a Jewish woman who drinks, chain smokes and proves entirely dissolute when it comes to men. Wanda's clearly trying to numb her senses because there's nothing in her life but pain.

Wanda lost her young son during the war, probably to Polish murderers who hid some of her family and then turned on them. She participated in postwar trials that sent anti-socialists to their deaths and earned her the nickname "Red Wanda."

She still has some Communist Party juice, which she's not afraid to use, but if Wanda ever believed in anything, the foundation of those beliefs long ago turned to ash.

The bulk of the movie involves a road trip taken by Ida and Wanda. The duo searches for the spot where Wanda's sister and Ida's parents were buried. Their mission brings them into contact with a farmer who now occupies the rural home that once belonged to Ida's family.

At a nearby hotel, Ida and Wanda also meet a young saxophone player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who's enamored with John Coltrane and who seems as if he dropped in from another movie. That may be the point: His presence underscores the insularity of Ida's world.

The film reaches one resolution and then continues carrying its burden toward a second set of conclusions. It's just here that Pawlikowski began to lose me in a rash of second guesses and doubts about the behavior of both Ida and Wanda.

As much control as Pawlikowski has over his images, I'm not sure he has an equal amount of sway over the developments that provide the movie with its final act.

To me, Ida seems more like a compelling starting point for consideration of the complex issues Pawlikowski raises than a fully realized drama about those issues. Applications for that job still are being accepted.