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
