Rock and Roll Arrives in Cold War

Features—

Apr 7, 2021

Zula knocks back two shots like they’re water, picks up a brimming martini glass, and struts right up to her current lover’s former lover—a poetess, at that—to introduce herself. “Bon soir,” says Zula, French still a little heavier on her tongue than her native Polish, so she doesn’t waste any more words: “I thought a lot about your lyrics to my song. ‘The pendulum has killed time.’ Nice, but I don’t get it.”

Juliette—a slim, elegant brunette in a plunging backless dress who, as a favor to her ex Wiktor, has translated Zula’s beloved Polish traditional “Dwa serduszka” into French—smiles tightly. “It’s a metaphor,” Juliette explains. “That time doesn’t matter when you’re in love.” The two exchange a few more lines, as tart and frigid as chilled gin, and then continue to circulate the party. This is Paris, 1957. Edith Piaf is still releasing music and somewhere in the city Jean-Luc Godard is shooting All the Boys Are Called Patrick, the second-to-last short film he’d make before Breathless and its daring jump cuts asserted, in their own wild way, that the pendulum has indeed killed time.

A little while and a lot of liquor later (“métaphore,” Zula sneers to herself in the bathroom mirror, slugging from a half-empty bottle before adding, in Polish, “idiot”), the party has migrated from this bougie Paris apartment to Eclipse, the smoky, low-lit club in which we’ve previously seen Zula performing a rearranged (but not yet translated) chanson version of “Dwa serduszka.” Wiktor had been accompanying her tenderly on piano that night, but here in the aftermath of the party a chasm of mistrust and doubt has opened between the lovers. Facing away from Zula and oblivious to her imploring glances, Wiktor is engrossed in conversation with one of his male colleagues. Zula slumps over the bar with another drink, looking catatonically bored, as the sighing string arrangement of Ella Fitzgerald’s “Blue Moon” fades out. Then Zula’s night is suddenly lightning-struck by a very different song about time: “One-two-three o’clock, four o’clock rock,” announces Bill Haley, voice-of-God-like. Zula grins, nods her head, as if he’s issuing a command directly to her. By “nine-ten-eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock rock,” she’s on her feet and heading to the center of the dance floor. Now here is a metaphor she can understand.

It has been said that Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” plays somewhere in the world every minute of every day. And while that’s probably just a bit of copy dreamed up by an especially poetic press agent, plenty more concrete measurements of the song’s iconicity exist: “Rock Around the Clock” was, in July 1955, the first-ever rock-and-roll song to hit number one on the Billboard pop chart, where it stayed for the rest of that summer. From the 1970s onward, the Guinness Book of World Records listed it consistently as the biggest-selling vinyl single of any pop music recording, until some time in the 1990s when they just stopped counting. It has soundtracked the memorable openings of Blackboard Jungle, American Graffiti, the first two seasons of Happy Days, and even an eponymous 1956 film made quickly to cash it on its popularity. It has been parodied by The Simpsons,Family Guy, and Sesame Street, and in 2017 it was used in a commercial to announce, with urgent fanfare, that the Subway reuben sandwich was back—but only for a limited time!

I’m sure I saw that commercial once or maybe several dozen times, not that I can recall. My ears had by then become numb to “Rock Around the Clock,” could not hear it as anything more specific than lazy (if expensively cleared) shorthand for “the birth of rock-and-roll rebellion.” To someone like me, born in the mid-1980s, it was mass-pop-cultural white noise, and if I’d thought about it consciously at all I would have doubted that something could wrest it from its status as a cliché. Then I saw Paweł Pawlikowski’s remarkable 2018 film Cold War.

Much has been made—rightly—of the film’s steamy, tragic romance (loosely based on that of Pawlikowski’s own parents), its stars’ blazing good looks, and Łukasz Żal’s Oscar-nominated, Sven Nykvist–esque cinematography. But what I appreciate most about Cold War is at once simpler and more sweeping: I find it to be one of the truest movies ever made about the way music drifts through cultures and individuals’ lives, occasionally upending them entirely.

This is a recurring preoccupation of Pawlikowski’s cinema. Recall that it is the siren song of John Coltrane’s “Naima” (as played by a particularly enticing alto saxophonist) that first lures the titular nun in Ida out of her comfort zone and, eventually, her habit. (Recall, too, that Joanna Kulig, who plays Zula in Cold War, has a bit part as the lead singer in the saxophonist’s band.) Music traverses moral and political borders more easily than people do in Pawlikowski’s films, or maybe it’s just a few beats ahead of them—a psycho-spiritual force beckoning them to come to the other side.

Zula and Wiktor first meet when she is trying out for a state-sponsored Mazurek folk ensemble (based on an actual, long-running Polish troupe, Mazowsze), though the audition song that catches his ear isn’t a Polish traditional but “Serdtse,” a jazzy love song from the 1934 Soviet musical Jolly Fellows. A traveling cinema showing the film had once stopped in Zula’s village, and she committed the tune to heart. “Where did you get that song?” Wiktor asks of this bit of cross-cultural contraband. “The movies,” she replies. Naturally.

The movies, like music, can sneak all sorts of inspiration across cultural and temporal borders. When Cold War was released, for example, Pawlikowski described his affection for Godard’s 1962 Vivre sa vie: “It all gave you the sense that cinema is jazz and anything goes, as long as you get back to the beat and the key at the right time.” Beyond this shared sense of musicality, the two films have plenty more in common: Modest run-times, lonely visions of Paris, and inventive formal structures that draw attention to what is omitted between scenes through striking fades to black. Oh, and of course—two of the greatest I’m-happy-but-I’m-sad dancing sequences ever put to film.

The most memorable scene in Vivre sa vie is titled, devastatingly, “Nana Wonders Whether She’s Happy.” Nana—an existentially curious sex worker with a Louise Brooks bob, embodied by the immortal Anna Karina—puts Michel Legrand’s groovy “Swing! Swing!” on the jukebox and sways around the café, trying in vain to catch the eye of one or any of the men there. They all avert her gaze, enveloped in more “serious,” “masculine” matters. We see the realization gradually dawning on Nana as her dancing becomes more frenzied and desperate: What does her own happiness matter if no one is looking at her? If men are not looking at her, does she even exist?

In her gloriously manic, drunken dance to “Rock Around the Clock,” Zula is asking a related question: Can she ever be truly happy—or be anything at all—if Wiktor doesn’t see her? The scenes are so poignant because in both of them the woman’s joy is performative: Nana and Zula are trying to look like they’re having carefree fun, but these songs are actually providing outlets for them to work out deeper feelings of anger, betrayal, and isolation.

Still, “Swing! Swing!” fits immediately within the aesthetic of Vivre sa vie—the way a Michel Legrand song will always fit within the aesthetic of a French New Wave film. The appearance of “Rock Around the Clock” in Cold War is such a jolt because it seems to transplant a beyond-recognizable staple of American pop culture into a film that otherwise feels so quintessentially European. An atmosphere of demure chansons and reverent Polish folk tunes is suddenly disrupted by a familiar, English-language staple of nostalgic television and commercial soundtracks. To American viewers—or at least to me, the first time I saw it—the song seemed to break with the logic of the film.

It doesn’t really, though. That’s because of another thing that was happening in Europe in 1957: Bill Haley and His Comets were streaking across the continent—the first major American rock group to tour Europe. Among the wide-eyed youngsters whose brains were reportedly scrambled by that ’57 tour: Paul McCartney (“The ticket was twenty-four shillings, and I was the only one of my mates who could go as no one else had been able to save up that amount”), Graham Nash (“I’ve still got the ticket stub in my wallet”), and Pete Townshend (“The birth of rock and roll for me? Seeing Bill Haley and the Comets . . . God, that band swung!”). “Rock Around the Clock” may have been old news stateside by 1957—Elvis played Ed Sullivan in September 1956—but across Western Europe it was a white-hot import lighting up dance floors and planting all sorts of seeds of eventual cross-cultural artistic dialogue. By the beginning of the next decade, upstarts like the Beatles and the Who would, in turn, be putting their own moddish European spin on Haley’s electric Americana.

I have taken the existence of rock and roll for granted my entire life. When they tell me that Elvis’s quaking hips were once considered too hot for TV or that plugging in an electric guitar was once enough to get a guy called “Judas,” I’ve had to just take books and elders at their words. I’ve comprehended these turning points intellectually, if not in my heart or my toes. The closest I’ve come to viscerally understanding what a rip in the space-time continuum rock and roll must have felt like in the mid-1950s is seeing it barnstorm the elegant aesthetic world of Cold War, and the instantly vivifying effect it has on a lost soul like Zula. The pendulum has killed time, whatever that means. But Bill Haley—for two minutes and eight seconds that are also somehow twenty-four hours—makes it infinite.

Rock and Roll Arrives in Cold War

Rock and Roll Arrives in Cold War

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