Film review

  • Never Gonna Snow Again

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Śniegu już nigdy nie będzie

    Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert (2020)

    As I watched, I kept thinking:  once it’s over I can find out what it means.  Sure enough, Alex Ramon’s interview with Małgorzata Szumowska in Sight and Sound (November 2021), informative about the film’s socio-political context, clarified themes implied in Never Gonna Snow Again.  I still don’t get parts of it, though, and can’t help wondering if Szumowska and Michał Englert, who shares the directing and writing credits (and is also the cinematographer), prefer it that way – so as to reinforce their story’s sense of mystery.

    Nearly all the action takes place within a housing estate on the outskirts of Warsaw, in the present day.  Ukrainian immigrant Zhenia (Alec Utgoff) is a regular visitor to this affluent gated community – he’s a masseur, treating people in their homes.  The symbolism of manned locked gates and an outsider being admitted through them isn’t hard to interpret (the S&S piece notes that ‘the vast majority of migrants to Poland in the last decade have been from Ukraine’).  More puzzling is the meaning of Zhenia’s extraordinary powers of touch.  (His various other accomplishments include a claimed ability to speak all languages.)  His laying on of hands goes well beyond conventional massage – Zhenia not only relaxes physical tensions but puts his clients into a trance, from which they emerge deeply refreshed.

    In a series of vignettes, Szumowska and Englert describe Zhenia’s interactions with residents of the estate, including Maria (Maja Ostaszewska), Ewa (Agata Kulesza) and Gucci (Katarzyna Figura).  Maria’s upwardly mobile veneer is paper thin – she’s quickly revealed as a desperate housewife and mother whose life is going nowhere.  Ewa is older, smarter and has a son (Maciej Drosio, Szumowska’s son) who’s a chemistry enthusiast and budding drug dealer.  Gucci’s life revolves around her pet bulldogs:  concerned that one of them is ‘apathetic’, she insists on a massage for the dog.  Zhenia’s male clients are the terminally ill husband (Łukasz Simlat) of Wika (Weronika Rosati), the one woman in the film whose sexual feelings for Zhenia are reciprocated, and, late on in the story, a bellicose ex-soldier (Andrzej Chyra), who lives alone.  In the film’s climax, Zhenia takes part in a piece of stage magic at a community show on the estate.  The routine involves a disappearing act from which he fails to reappear.

    Best known for appearances in the Netflix show Stranger Things, Ukraine-born Alec Utgoff cuts an imposing figure as Zhenia though I didn’t find him magnetic.  The strong supporting cast includes players familiar to this viewer from other Polish films.  Andrzej Chyra and Łukasz Simlat, who’ve both impressed in the past playing priests (Chyra in Szumowska’s In the Name Of (2013), Simlat in Jan Komasa’s more recent Corpus Christi (2019)), are fine actors, which may explain why their characters are the most interesting in Never Gonna Snow Again.  Also, these two men don’t fit so completely into the scheme of things, which gives them a degree of independent life.  In comparison, the female clients, though well played, are designed to represent various shades of physical attraction to the hunk masseur or the social set-up being lampooned.  This is particularly true of Maria.  No sooner has she emerged from her massage trance than she’s reaching for the Sauvignon and complaining about immigrants.  (She then realises who’s she talking to and clumsily assures Zhenia he’s different from the others.)

    A newcomer to a community transforms lives through physical intimacy then vanishes into thin air – Szumowska and Englert’s essential storyline recalls Pasolini’s Theorem (1968).  Never Gonna Snow Again often has an eerie look and the choice of music tends to the unearthly (including a beautiful song, sung in French by a choir of children from the estate at the climactic show).  Yet it’s less intriguing (also less funny) than Theorem, in which events, however bizarre, are described matter-of-factly.  And although the source and significance of his gifts are a puzzle, Zhenia isn’t unaccountable as his Theorem counterpart is.  Whereas Terence Stamp’s unnamed stranger arrives at the home of a rich Italian family from who knows where, Zhenia appears in scenes outside the gated estate.  He’s first seen walking along a city street, holding under his arm what turns out to be his fold-up massage bed.  He’s on his way to an interview with an elderly immigration officer (Jerzy Nasierowski), whom he hypnotises with a bit of neck massage.  While the man is unconscious, Zhenia stamps, signs and leaves with the paperwork he needs.

    Subsequent sequences show Zhenia in his bleak, cramped apartment, far removed from the sleek homes of his well-off clients.  The spotless houses on the estate are identical (although the door chimes vary).  Even if clever camerawork by Englert exaggerates the soulless look of the place, it’s alarming that (according to Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian) it’s a real one – the Ventana housing estate in Walendów, eastern Poland – rather than a CGI construction.  Zhenia’s grotty accommodation has a Soviet-era flavour and he hails from a resoundingly meaningful part of Ukraine – the town of Pripyat, close to Chernobyl.  He occasionally recalls, or dreams of, his childhood and his mother (played by the same actress who plays Wika in the present day).   He had his seventh birthday on the day of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.  It was late spring but Zhenia (Konstantin Solowiow) mistook the clouds of radioactive dust for snow.

    There’s no reference in Szumowska’s S&S interview to her and Englert’s arresting title.  In the course of the film, two characters assert that it’s never going to snow again.  The first is a child, Maria’s younger daughter; the second is a Vietnamese immigrant (her somewhat anomalous presence on the estate is one of many things to infuriate the former soldier).  The weather throughout the film is cold but dry, until the final minutes.  The last shot of white stuff gives way to text on the screen about a theory that the climate crisis will mean no snowfall anywhere on Earth after 2025.  Whether or not there really is such a theory, I don’t understand how it connects to the Chernobyl snowflakes.

    26 October 2021

  • Early Spring

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sōshun

    Yasujiro Ozu (1956)

    The season of the translated English title[1], with its promise of warmth to come, is at odds with the spiritual weather described and explored by Yasujiro Ozu in this, his longest-ever film (145 minutes) and the next to last that he made in black and white.  Its immediate predecessor in the Ozu filmography is Tokyo Story (1953).  According to Nick Wrigley’s booklet essay accompanying a BFI DVD release of Early Spring in 2012 (an extract formed the programme note for this screening), Ozu was ‘profoundly ashamed that Tokyo Story was considered to be an ordinary melodrama that makes audiences cry’.  He was at pains in his next film to ‘avoid anything dramatic, and instead piled up scenes where nothing at all happens, so as to let the audience feel the sadness of their existence’.  His strategy succeeds.  Early Spring is impressive but formidably pessimistic.

    Shoji (Ryo Ikebe), a white-collar worker at a Tokyo brick-making company is, in his mid-thirties, dissatisfied with his job and his home life.  He starts to cheat on his wife, Masako (Chikage Awashima), with the younger Chiyo (Keiko Kishi), the office flirt, whose big eyes have earned her the nickname Goldfish.  By the time that Shoji is transferred to a provincial outpost of the company, he and Masako have separated, and he travels to his new base alone.  A few days later, Masako decides to join him there.  They agree to make a new start.  That’s about it, in terms of essential plot.  The storyline doesn’t sound very original but Ozu takes care to deprive familiar events in a marital-cum-midlife-crisis drama of the emotions with which they’re usually charged.  There’s next to no passion in Shoji’s affair with the Goldfish.  He and Masako eventually reconcile without any suggestion that their relationship has been reinvigorated.

    The couple once had a son, who died of infant cholera.  The scene that reveals this, some way into the narrative, is perhaps the most startling illustration of Ozu’s approach in Early Spring, which he wrote with his frequent collaborator, Kogo Noda.  Shoji tells a male work colleague that he hadn’t wanted to be a father in the first place but got used to his son and, when the boy died, ‘I cried and cried’.  He and Masako tried for another child but it didn’t happen.  Although the bereavement has no doubt contributed to Shoji’s disillusionment, there’s little to suggest that he and his wife were happy in the early years of their marriage.  And children aren’t presented in this film as wholly and wonderfully transformative in their parents’ lives.  Another of Shoji’s colleagues drily remarks that ‘babies come along more often than pay rises’.

    The principals, in other words, aren’t the only disappointed people in Early Spring and the pervasive atmosphere of disenchantment is numbing:  characters don’t seem to fight for their marriages or their ‘salaryman’ jobs or even, in one case, to stay alive.  There is companionship – at work, in bars and mahjong parlours – but, in sharp contrast to Tokyo Story (and other Ozus), little interaction between different generations of a family.  Several sequences feature people singing together, including ‘The Fireflies Glow’ (to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’), but even convivial exchanges have a going-through-the-motions quality.  As always in Ozu, domestic scenes still predominate but to bleak effect on this occasion.  They mostly take place in Shoji and Masako’s home, which is not only loveless but welcomes few visitors.  (Despite that, the cast seems, for this director, unusually large.  The well-known faces include Chishu Ryu and Haruko Sugimura.)

    Occasional outdoor shots – notably of work buildings, with the brick factory chimney belching smoke – compound rather than relieve the characters’ sense of claustrophobia.  As usual in Ozu films of this period, you’re reminded, in references to military service, of the recentness of the World War.  The legacy of Allied Occupation, which ended in 1952, is evident in English language advertising on display, such as a lone, rather confounding travel poster that urges a visit to Finland.

    19 October 2021

    [1] According to Google’s Japanese-English translator, the original Japanese title is climatically neutral with ‘sōshun‘ translated as ‘seasonal’.

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