Cold war Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

roma For my birthday, I got to watch ROMA, the final Best Picture nominee for the Academy Awards, and the winner in the Best Foreign Language category.

I saw it at Proctors in Schenectady. To my surprise, there is an 80-seat cinema on the third floor. Since it was a weekday, there were only about a dozen other folks present.

By the end of the film, I better understood some of the choices that took place earlier, such as the lengthy floor washing that opened the film. But not all of it.

Clearly it was autobiographical, set in 1970/1971 Mexico City. Alfonso Cuarón talks about this in the brief the Meaning of Memory, which explains that ROMA is “organic” and flows with a rhythm of its own.

You know how it is when you first watch a film and it takes a few minutes to acclimate yourself to the characters and story? For me, this movie took about 50 minutes of the 135-minute running time to get there. Payoff, yes, but not quite enough.

I found snippets of three reviewers, who gave ROMA positive reviews that speaks to my dissatisfaction.

“An incidental thread that serves as an excuse for the director to capture on screen an amalgam of memories and a veritable whirlwind of sensations on the surface.”

These things apparently happened the director, but it isn’t always clear why WE should care.

“ROMA is in a league of its own in terms of sheer cinematic ambition and prowess, but as a drama it’s not as deeply moving as some of this year’s very best.”

“Cuaron is a bit too close to the material, and most moviegoers will have to do a lot of research to truly get and appreciate the movie.” (Grace Randolph, Beyond the Trailer)

See, I don’t WANT to do research to GET the movie. I shouldn’t need to understand the context of the domestic troubles in Mexico to understand the significance of a fire or of shooting off guns. I want the movie to explain it.

I must say that I very much loved the youngest boy and his preternatural view of the world, and did care about the core family by the end. But it wasn’t my favorite of the films, and it wouldn’t have even been my foreign film pick, as I preferred Cold War.

Cold War Zimna wojna If you don’t like everything about Cold War, the Best Foreign Film nominee from Poland, you may enjoy the nearly continually wave of music. It starts with a guy playing something that sounds, but doesn’t look, like bagpipes, and another fellow playing a fiddle. They alternately play and sing some folk song.

The viewer sees a couple traveling the countryside of Poland just after World War II, looking for authentic folk singers from the countryside. I imagine it was like how ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded musicians from the southern US and elsewhere.

Then the singers and dancers are culled in some Lawrence Welkian American Idol cattle call, with the best ones trained at a boarding school. They tour and become an unexpected hit.

But an apparatchik wants more songs touting Lenin and Stalin. It is cold war Poland in the early 1950s by then.

All of this is backdrop for an intense, “fatefully mismatched” love story between the singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) and the music director Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) which drives the story. Can one be more free in Communist Poland than in Paris? The movie’s tagline: “Love has no borders.”

The cinematography by Lukasz Zal is often gorgeous. His Oscar nomination is well-deserved. He has already won an award from the American Society of Cinematographers, USA. There is an early scene in the black-and-white film where even a mud path looks like beautiful marble.

Pawel Pawlikowski, who was justifiably been nominated for a best director Oscar, won at the Cannes Film Festival. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Piotr Borkowski.

Cold War is in Polish and French, subtitled. It’s rated R “for some sexual content, nudity and language.” It contains one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, seriously, done with mirrors.

My wife and I saw it, naturally, at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. I’ve asked for the soundtrack for my birthday.

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