“I always like using music dramatically as a character in the film,” Pawlikowski says about the story, which was inspired by his parents and won him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Woven throughout Pawlikowski’s film is an eclectic mix of songs that the director personally selected to comment on (or undermine) moments in the duo’s often discordant relationship.

After Zula bails on their planned defection, Wiktor reinvents himself as a jazz pianist in 1950s Paris, and the two reunite intermittently as Zula enjoys the perks of stardom in communist Poland.īut the film is also an ode to music itself.

Beginning in postwar Poland, their tempestuous coupling and uncoupling plays out over 15 years, in a variety of countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is the group’s musical director, a reserved, classically trained pianist who can’t help but fall for the charismatic singer.

Zula (Joanna Kulig), a beautiful and volatile blonde who may have been imprisoned for stabbing her father (“He mistook me for my mother so I used a knife to show him the difference”), cons her way into auditions for the state-sponsored Mazurek folk-song-and-dance group. Cold War, co-written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, tells the bittersweet story of two star-crossed lovers.

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