Cold War as the anti-Star Is Born film of 2018

Pawel Pawlikowsky's film Cold War (2018) is a great story of doomed lover and their tempestuous relationship that plays out in a series of episodes across a 20-year time span and that jumps back and forth across the East-West borders in Europe in the Soviet era. The film is beautiful to watch, shot all in b/w in a "square" format, as cinematicly attractive in its retro way as the much-more-recognized film from the same year, Roma. In essence, the film begins as a team of musical ethnographers - much like say Alan Lomax in the U.S. - travel across rural Poland in about 1946 in search of folk music and musicians for a state-sponsored traveling troupe. The man leading the search eventually falls for a much-younger and hard-knock-life woman who's one of the stars of the troupe. Over the span of the movie we see how state officials put the squeeze on the troupe to ditch their folk tunes and sing in pieces in praise of the great Soviet leader; there's lots of spying and subterfuge - and eventually a sprint for the West when the troupe performs in Berlin. We follow the two lead characters as their love develops and dissolves, as do their careers - the man settling for work as a piano-player in various Paris clubs, seemingly far below his ambition and talent, and the woman, Zula, crossing back and forth East to West and back, as restrictions are gradually lifted - but she still makes some terrible decisions, under great pressure from one of the Communist stooges, and at last we see her performing in a ridiculously bad night-club routine. (I can attest that in a visit to Moscow in the early '70s the powers that be were still steering tour groups and visitors to incredibly boring performances of ethnic dance - from the various Soviet "republics" - and to supper clubs with almost hilarious bad and out of date chanteuses and so-called jazz bands.) Like his previous political-historical film, Ida (which also used jazz music in an intelligent and surprising manner), Cold War is hard-edged and sad, sort of the anti-Star Is Born film of 2018, as we see the struggles to build a life and a career and to be true to one's self not just against a wave of commercial pressures but against political pressures that can shut you off completely - or lock you up.