Cold War: Film review
This is not a full review. It is more of a recommendation to a certain kind of movie viewer.
A film student in my department told me Cold War was very good, so I saw it was free on Amazon and watched it last night. It was affecting. I won't forget about it soon, which is always the sign of a good movie. Mediocre movies I watch and forget.
If you are one of those people who doesn't watch movies to read, it's not for you. It's also slow, with lots of long takes of the characters' faces. It is in Polish, French, a little German, and an occasional English word or song. It is about a world 60 or more years ago, when I was young and that today's millennials never knew (and therefore think we are exaggerating about communism).
Additionally, the film does not "fill in the blanks." Every couple of years or so we have a segment about the characters. We don't know a whole lot about what happens in between. We just know where they are in that time frame. I personally like this, and am trying to do it in my own writing without being confusing or illogical.
The movie is about passion without making us watch a lot of explicit sex. It is about love in the ruins, love in a time not made for love. About two people who want to be together and yet can't, both because of themselves and the political circumstances, and yet we don't get polemics about how bad the politics were. It is a tragedy, and the last line is so striking, I gasped.
Overall, it made me realize that my carefully constructed control is a mythology, that all of our carefully constructed controls are mythologies, when it comes to love. I'm not talking of love that is illicit (as this movie's love sort of is--I think the girl starts underage, and he's her teacher, and then she is married to two different men while still in love with him, and she's actually kind of a mess).
I mean any loving marriage is messy for if no other reason it is a risk. We say I do and yet we do not stay the same people we were when we said I do. We change, together and separately, circumstances change, and the "we-ness" changes. We love but our love is not agape-ic; we do not love purely and without some sense that we are benefited from the love. We sacrifice and want payback, or at least some equality. We sometimes hate the other person for not realizing who we are, for their being selfish, for their being a sinner even worse (or maybe not) than we are. We overlook them, and they us. And the other can get sick, develop mental illness, even reject God (or accept Him).
Messy. This movie made me face the messiness of relationships. Not a bad investment of time.
A film student in my department told me Cold War was very good, so I saw it was free on Amazon and watched it last night. It was affecting. I won't forget about it soon, which is always the sign of a good movie. Mediocre movies I watch and forget.
If you are one of those people who doesn't watch movies to read, it's not for you. It's also slow, with lots of long takes of the characters' faces. It is in Polish, French, a little German, and an occasional English word or song. It is about a world 60 or more years ago, when I was young and that today's millennials never knew (and therefore think we are exaggerating about communism).
Additionally, the film does not "fill in the blanks." Every couple of years or so we have a segment about the characters. We don't know a whole lot about what happens in between. We just know where they are in that time frame. I personally like this, and am trying to do it in my own writing without being confusing or illogical.
The movie is about passion without making us watch a lot of explicit sex. It is about love in the ruins, love in a time not made for love. About two people who want to be together and yet can't, both because of themselves and the political circumstances, and yet we don't get polemics about how bad the politics were. It is a tragedy, and the last line is so striking, I gasped.
Overall, it made me realize that my carefully constructed control is a mythology, that all of our carefully constructed controls are mythologies, when it comes to love. I'm not talking of love that is illicit (as this movie's love sort of is--I think the girl starts underage, and he's her teacher, and then she is married to two different men while still in love with him, and she's actually kind of a mess).
I mean any loving marriage is messy for if no other reason it is a risk. We say I do and yet we do not stay the same people we were when we said I do. We change, together and separately, circumstances change, and the "we-ness" changes. We love but our love is not agape-ic; we do not love purely and without some sense that we are benefited from the love. We sacrifice and want payback, or at least some equality. We sometimes hate the other person for not realizing who we are, for their being selfish, for their being a sinner even worse (or maybe not) than we are. We overlook them, and they us. And the other can get sick, develop mental illness, even reject God (or accept Him).
Messy. This movie made me face the messiness of relationships. Not a bad investment of time.
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