Movie review by Greg Carlson

Set in the fictional Little Woods, North Dakota — a small town in the western oil patch not too far from the Canadian border — Nia DaCosta’s first feature film as writer-director marks an auspicious and confident debut. Recalling some of the same issues explored in Courtney Hunt’s memorable “Frozen River,” “Little Woods” also shares its point of view through the harrowing day-to-day of two working class women pushed to break the law to survive. While “Frozen River” dealt with the illegal trafficking of immigrants across the northern border, “Little Woods” addresses the limitations of the U.S. healthcare system via the smuggling of prescription pharmaceuticals. DaCosta’s commentary is not limited to the state of absurd drug costs. She also acknowledges the exploitation of the poor by predatory energy speculators, the frustrations of mortgage options for a person of meager means, and abortion access.

Despite the checklist of social issues and the mostly erroneous descriptions identifying the movie as a kind of western, “Little Woods” operates with the tension of a crime thriller. Tessa Thompson adds yet another astonishing performance to her already remarkable filmography. As Ollie, Thompson perfects the weary guardedness that comes from hand-to-mouth living. Coming up on the end of a term of mandated supervision, the reminder given to Ollie by her probation officer Carter (Lance Reddick) that she is just days away from successful completion should clue the audience that the final stretch is going to be a rough ride. Carter’s encouragement of and belief in Ollie don’t prevent him from doing his job, and DaCosta puts together a brilliantly nerve-wracking sequence when Carter pays less-than-truthful Ollie a surprise visit.

Just as she approaches the finish line, Ollie’s single-mom sister Deb (Lily James) confesses that she is pregnant and uncertain about her short term housing options. Coming up with even a few thousand dollars to postpone foreclosure on their recently deceased mother’s place is out of reach. Navigating the system is difficult enough, but Ollie’s troubles are exacerbated by both the father of Deb’s young son (James Badge Dale) and a competing local dealer (Luke Kirby) very unhappy to learn Ollie is getting back in the trade. In large ways and small, DaCosta sharply explores the ways in which women navigate a hostile environment dominated by men.  

Those familiar with the short and long-term impact of hydraulic fracturing on the Bakken formation’s North Dakota oil boom will immediately recognize the living conditions of the men and women working in and around the industry. The look and feel of Yvonne Boudreaux’s production design, Patrick Jackson’s set decoration, and Colin Wilkes’ costuming evoke the tough realities seen in nonfiction films like Isaac Gale’s “Sweet Crude Man Camp,” J. Christian Jensen’s “White Earth,” Jesse Moss’ “The Overnighters,” and Rita Baghdadi and Jeremiah Hammerling’s “My Country No More.” And even though “Little Woods” was shot in Texas, most North Dakotans won’t find much of anything amiss in the representation.   

DaCosta is flat-out terrific at constructing scene after scene of anxious menace. I can’t wait to see what she does collaborating with Jordan Peele on the upcoming “Candyman.” The examples are plentiful (just look at what the director does with a clinic waiting room), but Deb’s harrowing quest to obtain a fake ID while Ollie casually tries to distract a cop is a master class in cross-cutting. DaCosta intensifies the dread of being busted with the terrifying alarm of a possible sexual assault. Sexism and toxic masculinity are not unusual in this genre, but DaCosta’s emphasis on sisterhood and the presentation of a female point of view turn “Little Woods” into a fresh, must-see cinematic experience.

“Little Woods” is the closing night feature of the 2019 Fargo Film Festival, screening on Saturday, March 23 at 7:00 p.m. The film will be released theatrically in April. 

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Early 1960s Oklahoma is an ideal setting for classic coming of age themes in Martha Stephens’s “To the Stars.” Richer in characterization and emotion than it is in plotting, “To the Stars” capitalizes on Andrew Reed’s beautiful monochromatic cinematography, with inky blacks and shimmering silvers aspiring to the same kind of nostalgia conjured by the legendary director of photography Robert Surtees in “The Last Picture Show.” Shannon Bradley-Colleary’s screenplay focuses on teenagers Iris Deerborne (Kara Hayward) and Maggie Richmond (Liana Liberato), two misfits locked in the age-old struggle to find acceptance and love in a stifling environment that prizes conformity and rewards narrow-mindedness.

Hidden behind owlish and ill-fitting spectacles, the introspective Iris fails to conceal the open secret of her urinary incontinence, an unfortunate condition exacerbated by the horrifying epithet “Stinky Drawers,” a nickname frequently hissed by the school’s clique of cruel kids. New girl in town Maggie sees right through the haters, recognizing in Iris a kindred outsider spirit. Maggie’s boast that her father shoots photographs for the venerable magazine “Life” — whether true or not — impresses all the queen bees, who would like to incorporate Maggie into their fold. In fact, Maggie offers the juicy tidbit regarding her father’s occupation as the reason for her recent relocation from a bigger city. Only later will Stephens explore the real reason behind the new town/new start change of address.  

Stephens goes on to render the evolving friendship of the assertive Maggie and the timid Iris through common rites of passage that point toward the possibility of romance between the two. The director handles all the confused attraction with enough sophistication that the plot’s actual direction sneaks up in a manner that smartly defies cliche as well as the audience’s first likely guess. The inevitable punishment for lesbian love still arrives right on time, complete with a melodramatic mob of stone-casters right out of James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” but en route Stephens capitalizes on the revelation of an unexpected pairing.

Hayward and Liberato are supported by a cast that includes Malin Akerman, Tony Hale, Shea Whigham, and Jordana Spiro as the parents of the girls. All four performers, contending with varying degrees of somewhat wispy roles, bring quality to the production. Spiro’s open flirtation with Iris’s classmate Jeff (Lucas Jade Zumann in a sensitive performance with echoes of Timothee Chalamet) recalls, of all things, a similar triangle in Martha Coolidge’s 80s teen classic “Valley Girl.” Whigham is especially warm as the father of Iris, as supportive of his daughter as he is frustrated by his spouse.

Stephens keeps notes of observational humor in the mix, but sticks to a serious-minded realization of the period through the eyes and experiences of the women in the story. This female-centric point of view undeniably unfolds as the greatest strength of “To the Stars,” as the aspirations and heartbreaks experienced by Maggie and Iris ripple out in waves familiar to many of the other women in Wakita, including the kind hairdresser Hazel (Adelaide Clemens). Any storyteller working with content set in an earlier time has the potential advantage of using the past to comment on the present, and Stephens certainly has much to say about the incredible pressure placed upon young women to fulfill the expectations of peers, family, and community.  

“To the Stars,” produced by Northern Lights Films, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. A special screening at the Fargo Film Festival is set for Saturday, March 23 at 3:00 p.m. Members of the production team will participate in a Q and A. Tickets are available at the Fargo Theatre box office.     

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Almost relegated to the trashcan of history and the file drawer marked for popular cultural ephemera, the audio and/or video recordings of the industrial musical are properly dusted off and polished to a state of splendor in Dava Whisenant’s “Bathtubs Over Broadway.” The first-time feature director, who earned the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, follows longtime David Letterman staff writer Steve Young on his dogged pursuit of increasingly rare LPs of fully-produced, brain-melting shows promoting the corporate images of giants like Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, and Xerox.

Young’s crate-digging prowess developed as he unearthed the ridiculous gems and curiosities used as fodder for the long-running “Dave’s Record Collection” segment of the talk show. Even as the most far-out titles were ripe for on-air ridicule, Young was magnetically drawn to the souvenir and “internal use only” collectibles that were also commonly marked “not for broadcast” or “not for commercial use.” Whisenant enthusiastically conveys both the thrill of the hunt and the endearing excitement with which Young approaches fare like G.E.’s 1973 “Got to Investigate Silicones.”   

That’s just one terrific example, but of the productions highlighted in the film, perhaps none can top American-Standard’s incredible “The Bathrooms Are Coming!,” Sid Siegel’s phantasmagoric ode to the luxurious offerings of the company’s 1969 fixture lineup. Fellow deep divers like Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra and Don Bolles of the Germs are quick to praise that recording’s unforgettable je ne sais quoi, and it’s difficult to disagree when you hear lyrical firestarters that begin with “My bathroom is a private kind of place…” In one of the movie’s many treats, Whisenant and Young go one better, investigating the show’s surreal vignettes and connecting with original “Bathrooms” performers.

Fans of Letterman will appreciate how Whisenant’s profile of Young coincides with the end of the “Late Show with David Letterman” in the spring of 2015. The filmmaker uses the program’s curtain call as Young’s own midlife turning point and pause for self-reflection. The bittersweet farewells to colleagues as Young packs up his desk ripple out to appreciators of American broadcasting history in the audience, and Whisenant (who edited several dozen episodes of “Late Show”) probably has enough material to pursue another feature film examining the end of the Letterman era of nighttime entertainment. Letterman, one of several executive producers of “Bathtubs Over Broadway,” appears briefly in the movie.

Whisenant emphasizes the ways in which Young’s quest have led him to meaningful interpersonal relationships and a sense of avocation that transcend his work as a writer of television comedy. Capturing interactions with well-known performers like Chita Rivera, Florence Henderson, and Martin Short, as well as other meetings with writers like Sheldon Harnick and Hank Beebe, Whisenant — through Young — communicates a commanding level of earnestness and respect for work that we previously thought was disposable. That surprising discovery, accompanied by the implication that one person’s art is another employee’s moldering memento of a 1965 Seagram Distillers distributor meeting, turns out to be the movie’s affirming heartbeat.

“Bathtubs Over Broadway,” with Whisenant and Young in person, will be featured as the opening night showcase of the 2019 Fargo Film Festival on Tuesday, March 19 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available now at the Fargo Theatre box office.     

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Director A.J. Eaton’s rock star biography “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” checks all the boxes of the lion-in-winter music documentary. Crosby’s clear-eyed laments for heady days of monumental drug consumption simultaneously see him twinkle with pride and blush with regret as he recounts his unbelievable adventures. As the irreplaceable C of CSN and CSNY, Crosby parlayed his early stardom as a founding member of the Byrds into an odyssey of legendary Pacific Coast songwriting and performing. A quintessential symbol of the countercultural movement championing peace and love, Crosby possessed the uncanny ability to land in several of the right places at several of the right times.

His instantly recognizable locks and mustache now snowy white, Crosby carries eight stents in his ticker and claims on camera that the next heart attack will surely take his life. But despite diabetes and declining overall health, he candidly and poignantly admits his hunger for more time. Eaton, with a major assist by producer Cameron Crowe, treats viewers to a personally guided tour of Crosby’s Los Angeles, and the tactic — which includes a spine-tingling stop outside the gate of the house where Crosby, Stills & Nash first took flight — electrifies pop music fans as much as any of the judiciously selected archival shots, like an excellent rarity showing papa Floyd Crosby at work as a cinematographer.   

Eaton’s approach, which heavily favors intimate close-ups as a contemplative Crosby unburdens himself, largely skips newly-collected content from the cast of famous figures most important to Crosby’s development. Opting instead for old talking-head clips to fill in key spots, Eaton sticks to a very specific kind of tale, passing over narratives involving Crosby’s children. Longtime spouse Jan Dance does enter the spotlight on occasion, and Eaton extensively covers Crosby’s significant relationships with Joni Mitchell (a rich section that provides one of the movie’s many highlights) and Christine Hinton, two of the three women who inspired parts of “Guinnevere.”    

A refrain of “how did I survive this?” propels other forays into the darkness. While the specifics of 1982 and 1985 arrests flow together, Crosby’s more-than-once rock-bottom drug and/or weapon charges extended all the way to 2004, when another bust was added to the record. News footage reporting on the nine months Crosby spent in Texas state prison draws serious gasps, but Eaton has an even bigger shock in store: the disastrous final performance of Crosby, Stills & Nash at the 2015 National Christmas Tree Lighting. Their off-key, out-of-tune butchering of “Silent Night” (which, at least, CSN did not choose) is an awful and embarrassing sunset on a career that includes masterworks like “Helplessly Hoping,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and “Teach Your Children.”  

Eaton elects not to dive too deeply into individual song histories, with “Ohio,” and the rawness that surrounds it to this day, standing as the most notable exception. The director uses a clip of Crosby’s infamous questioning of the Warren Commission report on stage at the legendary 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival to illustrate how his divisive and strident positions would alienate Crosby from his closest collaborators. The whole film, in fact, skews heavily toward an elegiac mournfulness that marvelously erases any and all of the punchlines depicting Crosby as an out-of-control, substance-abusing has-been, replacing them with a more complex — if deliberately incomplete — portrait of an enormously talented artist.   

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Documentarian Penny Lane adds another entertaining movie to her filmography with an inside look at the recent rise of the Satanic Temple. As a movie experience, “Hail Satan?” often lives deliciously. The film might even turn out to be a prime recruitment video for the organization co-founded in 2013 by onscreen imp/spokesperson Lucien Greaves. TST is the perfect subject for the witty and insightful Lane, who detonates truth bomb after truth bomb in a campaign to highlight the group’s unrelenting quest to expose hypocrisy and double standards and politically engage opponents of the separation of church and state. Unlike previous “devil worship” outfits, TST’s deliberate activism and community engagement far surpass the showmanship and self-promotion of Anton LaVey.

Lane’s focus on several of TST’s provocative operations takes precedence over any in-depth historical account of Satanism, but the filmmaker does make a little bit of room to consider the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which hysteria over purported ritual Satanic abuse and deep fear of the occult destroyed the lives of innocent people wrongfully accused of molesting children in their care. The most well-known example, the McMartin preschool trial, has been deconstructed elsewhere, but Lane effectively contextualizes the phantom conspiracies that scapegoated everything from Dungeons and Dragons to Motley Crue and other heavy metal acts that could be unmasked by playing their records backwards.

And speaking of goats, Lane squeezes every drop of blood from TST’s battle to bring the towering statue of Baphomet to the same public spheres occupied by Ten Commandments monuments in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Based on the illustration by Eliphas Levi, the striking 3000-pound bronze by sculptor Mark Porter quickly became the primary symbol uniting those who would challenge the likes of Tea Party conservative Jason Rapert, who serves District 35 in the Arkansas State Senate. A walking caricature, Rapert makes for a broad villain based on his sponsorship of a bill allowing for a stone marker similar to the ones popularized by Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille in a publicity stunt to drum up ticket sales for the 1956 Charlton Heston movie.

Lane also introduces viewers to a rainbow range of adherents and admirers of the dark side, using their many personal anecdotes to explain the appeal of the group. Especially savvy is the presentation of TST’s seven fundamental tenets, a list of logical, humanist principles that give the Old Testament laws a run for their money. But can the center hold in an organization given to the aggressive questioning of authority and the demonizing of hierarchy? Detroit’s Jex Blackmore partially answers that question, splintering from TST following disagreements over policy in performance art pieces too radical for Greaves and the central leadership.

Blackmore’s breakaway brand of Satanism could fill another feature, but Lane keeps her eye on TST’s media spotlight actions. While the Baphomet sequences dominate, viewers also bear witness to several of the group’s more curious pieces of political theater, from the innocuous (an adopt-a-highway clean-up) to the eyebrow-raising (After School Satan) to the deliberately scandalous (the ribald Pink Mass, teabagging and all, held at the gravesite of the mother of Westboro Baptist figurehead Fred Phelps). Viewers new to TST’s approach to the headline-grabbing values of blasphemy will surely be surprised that members do not worship any incarnation of an anthropomorphic, horned, pitchfork-wielding manifestation of evil, but instead use the iconography to satirize all manner of injustice, folly, and corruption.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

While his Fred Rogers documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” arguably captured more attention than any nonfiction feature released in 2018, Morgan Neville’s other big project, “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” deserves careful examination by anyone who loves movie history. A companion piece to the posthumous release of Orson Welles’ notorious “The Other Side of the Wind,” Neville’s film uses, among other sources, Josh Karp’s 2015 book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind” to offer viewers a contextualization aiming to sort out fact from fantasy. But Neville’s movie is also a beribboned box of irresistible petits fours that will be hungrily gobbled by Welles completists.

In the always-changing, ever-morphing screenplay for a film Welles claimed would only take two months to shoot but instead stretched to eight years, an aging film director named Jake Hannaford holds court at his Hollywood birthday party on what will be the last night of his life. Hannaford was played by a game John Huston, although Welles never let anyone, including Huston, forget that he could or should have taken the role himself. The character, of course, is Welles writ large, an amalgam of the wily mythmaker/truth-stretcher and other borrowed and stolen traits the one-time boy genius collected along his fascinating path — including a healthy dose based in part on Ernest Hemingway.

One of the film’s best stories relates the depth of cinematographer Gary Graver’s devotion to Welles, and it operates as a metaphor describing the risks of all-consuming commitment to a mesmerizing guru happy to snare any flies who venture too close to the web. Graver put everything, including his money, physical health, mental wellness, and his relationships with his own family members, on the line to help Welles realize “The Other Side of the Wind.” Graver’s labor was unpaid, and the photographer would take B-movie and porno gigs during the protracted production of Welles’ movie just to make ends meet. The details of the cameraman’s saga make up several it’s-all-true jaw-droppers in the documentary, and Neville doesn’t even have time to get to the fate of Welles’ “Citizen Kane” writing Oscar, which * gifted to Graver.    

Along with Graver, Neville admirably keeps track of a lengthy scorecard of commentators, conspirators, and contributors great and small, including Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall, Cathy Lucas, Dennis Hopper, Cybill Shepherd, and on and on. Each functions to connect a few or more of the dots of head-spinning in-jokes, asides, insults, and references Welles made in “The Other Side of the Wind” on behalf, or at the expense, of those in his orbit. Bogdanovich was one of the closest, and the longtime keeper of the Welles flame shares the incredible anecdote of receiving an envelope containing two letters from his mentor following cruel comments made by Welles and Burt Reynolds on “The Tonight Show.” One of the notes was heartfelt apology and one piled on the venom. Welles told Bogdanovich to take his pick.

Obviously, Welles did not live to finish “The Other Side of the Wind,” but the cut that now accompanies “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” into the world allows viewers to decide whether the great auteur has pulled off another of his famous magic tricks. As the ultimate maverick estranged from the studio system that chewed him up and spit him out, the master’s “final” film will be the experimental metanarrative gift that keeps on giving. “The Other Side of the Wind” adds another row of reflections to join with the ones in Xanadu and the Magic Mirror Maze. Its vibrating self-awareness, its doppelgangers, its arch life-imitates-art and art-imitates-life observations, its unwieldy traveling circus vibe, and its mind-bending movie-within-a-movie duality allow Welles to simultaneously mock and indulge in the critically celebrated, sexually-charged, Antonioni-style, European art film.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Shirkers” is title to both an uncompleted Singapore-based road movie starring Sandi Tan that was shot in the summer of 1992 and the autobiographical nonfiction examination of that lost film. With the benefit of time, Tan looks back on her own experiences, constructing a reflective bildungsroman with the requisite excitement, heartache, friendship, loss, and pain one expects from any great coming-of-age tale. As a 19-year-old on the island nation known more to outsiders for being cleaner than Disneyland than for any indie filmmaking scene, Tan joined forces with sisters-in-arms Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique to reach for cinematic glory. But after principal photography wrapped, much older mentor Georges Cardona disappeared with every can of the film.   

How many movies have been lost or nearly lost to circumstances that cause a derailment before a public release can provide closure for the anxious and expectant filmmaker? In some sense, “Shirkers” joins longstanding legends like Jerry Lewis’ “The Day the Clown Cried,” the Sex Pistols in “Who Killed Bambi?,” David O. Russell’s “Nailed,” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Kaleidoscope” (just to name a few) as a broken dream that lives on in the what-might-have-been corners of the imagination. As is the case with Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” and Morgan Neville’s companion piece “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” the journey almost always looms larger than the destination.      

Tan astutely minimizes the mystery of Cardona, refusing to turn the attention of her story to a narcissistic user undeserving of the starring role. Instead, she investigates the memories of her friends, both of whom were as gutted as Tan by the betrayal perpetrated by Cardona. Like “Rashomon,” each woman remembers unique aspects of the “Shirkers” endeavor that conflict with some of Tan’s thoughts. Ng, without mincing words, accuses Tan of being an asshole. Tan runs with it, examining vintage video that corroborates the claim. That willingness to make a deep dive on pieces of the puzzle that still trigger raw emotions is in keeping with Tan’s collagist, cut-and-paste, DIY, punk rock ethos.  

Tan is nothing if not gutsy, and like so many established celluloid heroes, she might have been practicing Academy Award acceptance speeches in the mirror before making anything of substance. She breathlessly identifies “Rushmore” and “Ghost World” as simpatico with “Shirkers,” juxtaposing rhyming shots to make a case for the hipster credibility of her unfinished opus. Lost synchronous sound recordings and mature judgment guided the decision to leave “Shirkers” a phantom. Like Tan, Ng, and Siddique, we may never know why Cardona robbed his young collaborators of their commitment and hard work, even though a few people acquainted with Cardona offer tantalizing theories.

Along the way, Tan finds a sympathetic sharer in Stephen Tyler, another protege of Cardona similarly mistreated by the movie magpie. Tyler credibly surmises that Cardona’s sense of pride, entitlement, and jealousy partly drove his cruelty. For example, Cardona began to claim that he was the inspiration for James Spader’s character Graham in “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” after Tyler and another mutual friend worked on Soderbergh’s film. “Shirkers” brims with references and allusions to movies that aid Tan as she spins her story. Clips from “Blue Velvet,” “Paris, Texas,” “Heathers,” “Nosferatu,” “Fitzcarraldo,” Singapore’s own “Cleopatra Wong” and many others will be familiar to anyone who speaks the language of cinephilia.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Another stunning work of perfectly placed ellipses and calculated restraint, Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War” is a film filled with images as iconic and austere as its blunt title. A haunting experience of history by suggestion, the movie traces a tragic romance across years and landscapes, relying as heavily on Lukasz Zal’s arresting, monochromatic, Academy ratio cinematography as it does on the sharp editing by Jaroslaw Kominski. Pawlikowski collaborated with both of those craftsmen on Oscar-winner “Ida,” and “Cold War” is a gorgeous companion that is every bit as good, and possibly even better, than the celebrated 2013 title.  

Clocking in crisply and efficiently at 85 minutes, “Cold War” wastes nothing, often presenting strings of diabolically economical short scenes to advance the narrative that focuses on musician/composer/conductor Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot) and singer/dancer/performer Zuzanna “Zula” Lichon (Joanna Kulig) as they come together and move apart and come together on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Pawlikowski dedicates the film to his parents and uses their names for his two protagonists. So skillful is the filmmaker at communicating in pure visual language, one need not know much about mid-20th century Eastern Europe to understand the challenges faced by artists trapped in the cogs of an oppressive political machine.

Along with the beautiful photography and knockout cutting, Pawlikowski laces “Cold War” with a soundtrack that captures the conflicting moods of clashing ideologies. Beginning with the rural folk and work songs sung by peasants and accelerating through small jazz combos and wild communist transpositions of swinging big bands, the fortunes and misfortunes of Wiktor and Zula are traced as much through the musical arrangements they perform together and separately as any dialogue they exchange with one another. At one exhilarating turning point, the infectious, magnetizing 12-bar blues of Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” instantly pulls Zula from her stool to the dance floor and the bar top.

As star-crossed as Ilsa and Rick, Zula and Wiktor painfully discover that they can’t live with or without each other in just the same way that they cannot live with or without Poland. One bureaucratic official is disbelieving and incredulous when Wiktor petitions to leave Paris to return to his homeland. We understand, even though the decision guarantees something menacing and horrific. Among the many other echoes of “Casablanca” is a shot that mirrors Ilsa’s surprising late night visit to see Rick at the Cafe Americain. As an analogue to Mr. Blaine, Wiktor also happens to be his own Sam. He plays his own placeholders for “As Time Goes By” whenever the longing for Zula overtakes him.  

Some viewers will adore the way in which Pawlikowski collaborates with his actors to create characters filled with the wholeness of familiar humanness, especially when the filmmaker withholds so much of the stuff we would expect in the presentation of a traditional screen romance. The pauses, the fades to black, and the spaces in between are all elisions that arouse deep curiosity, but also inspire us to wonder and imagine all kinds of things that Pawlikowski keeps from our eyes and ears. One of the best gifts of “Cold War” is that we never feel like we have been cheated.