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performances of ethnic dance - from the various Soviet "republics" - and to supper clubs with almost hilarious bad and out of date chanteuses and so-called jazz bands.)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.

Extraordinary b/w cinematography in Polish film Ida

The 2013 Polish film Ida should definitely has a shot at the foreign-language Oscar, for which it's nominated. It's a pretty simple, almost stark narrative, sent in a remote area of Poland circa 196655. It opens with novices in a monastery, scenes almost in silence except for the prayers; the mother superior tells one of the novitiates she has to visit her estranged aunt before she can take her vows; against her will, the young woman goes to visit her aunt, who informs her that she was born a Jew (named Ida) and that her family had been killed during the war. The two - very different characters, Ida shy and saintly, the aunt a stern judge with a serious drinking problem and a promiscuous streak - set off to the village where Ida's parents hid during the war to learn what they can about the wartime fate of her family. In a way, it's a journey of discovery; in a way, it's a road-trip buddy movie; in another way, it's about Ida's grappling with her faith and trying to determine the course to take in live: secular or religious, in the world or withdrawn from the world. Despite a few plot aspects that are opaque at least to non-Polish viewers (how did Ida's aunt avoid the assault on the Jews?, for example), the story line is simple and has a few surprising twists. What makes this movie exceptional, however, is the extraordinarily beautiful cinematography - all in b/w, capturing the look and feel, I imagine, of Poland in the darkest years of postwar poverty and communist rule - the impoverished countryside, the drab cities, the freezing cold austerity of the monastery, the cheesiness of a "tourist" hotel with a trashy nightclub that seemed 20 years removed from the music scene of the West. The look of the movie recalled for me the stark beauty of Nebraska, though not filmed in wide-angle, or some of the beautiful b/w films from Italy in the early days - but with a crispness and image clarity that would not have been possible in that era.