Cold War” is a faultless romantic epic

YOU may hear faint echoes of “La La Land” and “Chico & Rita” in Pawel
Pawlikowski’s music-based tragicomedy, in that it charts the on-off
relationship of a talented male pianist/composer and a magnetic female
performer. But the Polish-British writer-director of “My Summer of Love”
and the Oscar-winning “Ida” has composed something unique. The best
entry so far at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Cold War” is a moving
and gorgeously shot period romance which recreates the mid-20th-century
in flawless, unshowy detail, and which asks which siren song calls most
seductively: art, love, freedom or home. Mr Pawlikowski doesn’t play a
single bum note.

In its opening scenes, it looks as if “Cold War” is going to be an Eastern

European answer to Alan Parker’s “Fame”. The film’s rakish, middle-aged
hero, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), is forming a state-sponsored folk-music
ensemble in 1949. His job is to gather 20 or 30 singers and dancers from
all over rural Poland, install them in a tumbledown stately home, and
arrange and rehearse their peasant songs until they are ready to put on
prestigious concerts, thus selling a tidied-up version of the nation’s
cultural identity both to the wider world and to war-damaged Poland itself.
In short, he has to make music which is Polish, but with polish.