Cold War is a love story told through music.

Wailing and heartbreaking melodies sung by post-war Polish peasants, or by grotesquely solemn children, or by women bent by the toil of their labour, each about impossible loves and tormenting passions.

Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) leads a choir that promotes this music and dreams of elevating it to art.

He is an extremely competent man who seeks to bring out local talents to build a great ensemble.

He thus reviews all the local voices by holding auditions.

It is at one of these auditions that he meets Zula (Joanna Kulig).

With her voice, transcendent yet earthly, she sings a Russian folk tune with roaring swagger.

“Thank you, heart,” she sings with outstretched arms, “for knowing how to love this way.” Zula is a bold and strong-willed girl, with an irreverent glint in her eye that immediately captivates the helpless Wiktor.

The first confession she makes to him is the story of how she killed her father.

“He mistook me for my mother, so I showed him the difference between me and her with a knife,” she explains matter-of-factly.

Wiktor cannot help but fall madly in love.

As soon as Wiktor organizes the choir's first performance – with Zula as the lead – the Soviet government takes an interest, seeing it as a perfect mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda.

Wiktor and his production partner Irena (Agata Kulesza) grit their teeth as the ensemble sings a glorious hymn to Stalin in front of a huge banner of his face, and when the government funds a tour that takes them to Berlin, Wiktor plans his escape with Zula.

But she never meets him at their scheduled rendezvous, and he crosses the border alone, seemingly traveling through time to the bright lights of West Berlin.

Thus begins a decade of collapse and then incredible reunion between Zula and Wiktor, in Paris, Yugoslavia, and again in Poland.

Wiktor works as a musician and composer in Paris, absorbing the creativity and loose customs of the jazz scene, but when Zula arrives, she rails against bourgeois conviviality.

Pawlikowski lets the music – their language, their genre, the way they are sung – suggest the moods of their love and their progressive disintegration.

Like an endless fade, the two spiral around a rhythm that abstracts them and makes them strangers to each other, only to draw them back together in a never-ending vortex reminiscent of the suspended souls of Dante's Limbo.

Finally, the two lovers record an album together.

Zula has changed her style to adapt to the mood of French jazz, transforming her voice into a hoarse sigh, but her voice is anemic compared to its inimitable richness before.

Zula has become a hostile and biting woman; she scoffs at the metaphors Wiktor's poetess girlfriend writes for her to sing.

She leaves Wiktor and begins to wander, picking up some kind of husband in Italy, then returns to Wiktor.

The raw sincerity of the songs from her homeland is what truly illuminates her.

The two lovers have finally reached a point of no return: a non-place where their attraction seems to be the inescapable physical law that repels them.

Pawel Pawlikowski's film, loosely based on his parents' story, crosses the Iron Curtain and unfolds in the shadow of the difficulties that undermine a small love story until it becomes universal, the very idea of Love.

But it is the constant dialogue with that ambiguous and vacuous background in which the story is immersed, evolving with every change of location and time jump, that makes this work multitone and precious.

Music guides the desire that unites the two lovers, divides them, and evolves with them, telling a complementary story of an idealized Love finally rendered vacuous by incommunicability and distance.

Shot in dazzling black and white in 4:3 (like his previous film, Ida, Oscar winner 2013 for Best Foreign Language Film), it is visually stunning, passionate, melancholic, and rich in detail in equal measure.

An unclassifiable work that immediately reaches the viewer's heart and tears it to shreds.