<em>Cold War </em>Meditates on Exile, Nationalism, and Love

PARIS—Cold War, the latest feature by the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, is a stormy love story filmed in black and white and set between Poland and Paris during the early 1950s. It is also a film about a time when borders defined lives. Watching it now, at an unsettling time when borders seem to be making a comeback in Europe—with Brexit, namely—confirmed my sense that Pawlikowski is one of the subtlest, most historically astute directors of our time. His great themes are nationalism, exile, and with Cold War, love.

Pawlikowski is best known for the Academy Award–winning (2014), which was set in the 1960s and also filmed in black and white. That film told the story of an orphaned Polish novice who, on the eve of taking her vows to become a nun, discovers she’s Jewish and goes on a road trip in search stirred up a huge amount of controversy in Poland, whose nationalist government is to the question of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.