Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival
Like Phantom Thread last year Pawel Pawlikowski's magnificently romantic and visually bewitching new film Cold War deals in the secret languages and strange understandings between true lovers - that no matter how hard it is on your soul and constitution that person sitting across the table is the one made for you and vice versa, and you might be the end of each other but you'll be each other's beginnings too...
Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) meets Zula (Joanna Kulig, total supernova) thanks to lies - she's pretended to be something she's not (a small-town gal who, uh, didn't murder her father) in order to get something she wants (a singing and dancing gig in his show about Polish folk music). She says she can probably figure out how to dance and then for her Polish folk-art audition sings a song from a Russian movie - it's plenty; Wiktor's smitten from second one. And she knows it. And he knows she's lying and doesn't care. Man, she's got charm for miles. Eventually her lies become part of his mythos for her, well past her appreciating it - she'll be the maintainer of her own mythos, thank you very much, even if it's made of pieces that will never fit.
It's that constant battle of the wills with these two, stretched across a dozen years and half as many countries - back and forth across the mainland, sneaking from Parisian Jazz Clubs to Prison Sentence, each daring the other to admit defeat first and be a steadfast man, a known quantity of woman. Alas, it's always something. As it is, and as it goes - Movie Love rings truest the more impossible the odds, and these two make some impossibly fine music together. This is the musical romance of the season.
Cold War has finished screening for the NYFF but opens in theaters on December 21st.