Starring: Alec Utgoff, Maja Ostaszewska, Agata Kulesza, Weronika Rosati
Directed by: Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert
Rating: ★★★★☆
With all her talent and perseverance Małgorzata Szumowska could direct the perfect body horror, if only she was given the right script to work on. The making of mystery movie The Other Lamb (2019) proved that the Polish director feels very much at ease behind the camera also outside her country. And yet in fact her cinematic works are usually light but spiritual, despite the characters in Szumowska’s films are mainly driven by the pleasures and sorrows of the flesh.
Story-wise Śniegu już nigdy nie będzie (Never Gonna Snow Again) co-directed with cinematographer Michał Englert, is a healing journey much like Body/Ciało (2015) which was released before the more profane Berlin Silver Bear winner Mug (2018). Instead of eccentric psychotherapist and séance expert Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) featured in her earlier film, Never Gonna Snow Again puts in the limelight Zhenia (Alec Utgoff), a masseur who moved from Ukraine to Poland’s capital city to earn a living. More careful and introverted than Anna who tries to connect with the deceased, Zhenia, instead, endeavors to get in tune at a deeper level with the living.
He offers his services door-to-door only to a walled community near Warsaw carrying around his portable massage table. Ukrainians are the biggest foreign community in Poland and are looked at by many as a mere workforce. Zhenia instead is welcomed as a wonderful alien, almost a messiah figure capable of manipulating and healing the bodies and maybe unintentionally, the souls of his clients.
In one of the few sequences to take the viewers outside the gated housing, Zhenia performs on stage a disappearing act imbued with sensuality with one of the residents, Wika (Weronika Rosati). Through this splendid vanishing trick, Szumowska and Englert manage, at least for one moment, to summon the dispelling power of cinema against the fear of aging and death. Rosati plays also the role of Zhenia’s mother in the flashbacks from the masseur’s childhood. The snow falling on the characters in the finale has the same cathartic power of the frogs falling from the sky in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). Never Gonna Snow Again was Poland’s 2021 Oscar submission.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on November 26, 2021