As the Cold War recedes ever further into history, a lot of folks forget it made for some surprisingly sexy storytelling.

The opposition of the United States and NATO powers to the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations made the Iron Curtain quite literal, with the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall.

Many films took advantage of that political reality to fuel their tragic tales of star-crossed lovers, hopelessly divided between the former east Bloc and the West.

Even non-political romantic comedies produced during the 1980s, the final decade of the Cold War, revived the widespread use of what was referred to as UST, short for “Unresolved Sexual Tension,” with TV’s “Moonlighting” being a prime example.

Polish writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski illustrates in his film, “Cold War,” how romances can be struck dead once they are no longer forbidden.

In the wake of World War II, pianist and composer Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is dispatched to the Polish countryside to recruit its most musically talented peasant villagers. There he meets Zula (Joanna Kulig), a gifted singer and dancer with a shady past.

Zula is habitually misleading and manipulative, so while she and Wiktor have genuine chemistry, aided by their shared affinity for music, their mutual attraction never ascends to the level of love.

Wiktor projects too many of his own desires onto Zula to care about who she truly is, and Zula has no interest in revealing her true self to him or anyone else.

For that reason, it’s little surprise she fails to join him when he flees communist control to play piano in a bar in Paris.

But their magnetic attraction eventually proves too strong for her to resist, so she joins him in Paris, cuts an album as a singer, and performs on stage by his side.

The problem is, once their love is no longer forbidden, Zula experiences ennui similar to that expressed by Robin Williams’ expatriate Russian in 1984’s “Moscow on the Hudson,” in which he laments, “I hated my life in Moscow, but I loved my misery, because it was mine and I could hold it.”

Zula likewise admits how perfect her life is in Paris, but with such a glassy-eyed lack of affect that she comes across as dead inside. Her passion rises to the surface again only when she berates Wiktor for his passivity, goading him until he hits her, from which she derives a grim satisfaction.

Spock from “Star Trek” is admittedly not widely regarded as a love guru, but even he observed that “having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting,” and without spoiling too much of the rest of the story, what Pawlikowski has chronicled here is a relationship between two people who can’t bear to be apart but who struggle when they’re together.

If you’ve ever seen “Doctor Zhivago,” you know this ultimately only works out one way (spoiler alert: not well, by which I mean, in the Shakespearean sense of the term “not well”).

Fortunately, compelling performances by Kot and Kulig, and a vastly shorter running time than “Doctor Zhivago,” make “Cold War” a briskly paced and intriguing time capsule.

That being said, given that Pawlikowski has said his couple in this film is loosely based on his own parents, their story is the movie I would have been much more interested to watch.