Cold War is about 2 people who can't pull their sh+ together.

In real life this was the story of the director's parents, Zula & Wiktor, who were both incurable hot messes. Their love story spanned some 40 self-destructive years, across borders, involving nasty fights, infidelity, splits, reconciliation, more splits. By all accounts these were 2 unlovable people trying to fall in love. In the real world say you had friends or family like this, you'd write them off or even hate them.

What's incredible is how the director Paweł Pawlikowski tells this story with pure artistic objectivity; he doesn't inject any personal bias no matter how much I'm sure he was disappointed in his parents for alternately abandoning each other, and him, in what would otherwise be a saucy trainwreck for the Jerry Springer show. Here it's presented in glorious high-contrast black & white, hiding the blemishes and warts, turning this ugly story into a visual poem.

If real life looked like this, maybe it wouldn't be so yucky 😛