Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 27, 2021 1:33 pm 
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Watch this in the virtual series Kino Polska from BAM Apr. 30-May 6, 2021

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ALEC UTGOFF IN NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN

Manipulation

This very enjoyable movie is a sly and cunningly crafted satire on bourgeois self absorption. It centers on a gated community of strangely tasteful (but far too close and numerous) white McMansions clustered on the edge of an ugly Polish city. Their inhabitants' various kinds of desperation make them putty in the hands of a mysterious masseur from Ukraine known only as Zenia (Alec Utgoff) who gains the reputation of having special powers. Malgorzata Szumowska and her coauthor Michal Englert keep us guessing. Maybe he actually has them; but more likely he's only good at making it seem that way.

We're led to believe that Zenia isn't really legal but has a knack for slipping in and out unnoticed. In the end he literally disappears in a classic conjuring trick; at the outset, on arrival, he gets his foreign worker document by putting the official, who's asked to be fixed, to sleep at his desk and stamping the paper himself. He is a conjurer; but that means a fake, doesn't it?

Zenia never joins the posh world he visits every day with his folding massage table slung over his shoulder. He lives in a grim, slim high rise slum flat in a housing project. But seemingly various families or individuals of the gated community take him in. He is handsome, almost pretty, curly-haired, ageless, and various women are drawn to him and at least one sleeps with him, putting temporarily to rest our doubts about his sexuality. There is a family man with cancer and Zenia eventually becomes his last hope.

It's hard to convey the sense of pleasure the movie provides. It teases and lulls us; its cinematography is beautiful, is actors are interesting, its story has a cunning ambiguity. Its editing smoothly interweaves episodes and houses so they blend together and yet remain distinct. It shows off Alec Utgoff's many skills and makes Zenia look almost luminous, yet very physical in the cutaway undershirt he strips to for massages, with his perpetually pleasant, neutral expression. This film is all about teasing and satisfying, always a little of both.

The mood created is reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos. There is the same detached, mocking view of social custom. Some of the people are absurd, like the woman who lives alone with her three French bulldogs in a house full of bulldog sculpture and bulldog memorabilia; but the man dying of cancer engenders sympathy. In time the film's shortcomings start to appear. It hasn't much further to go than a series of incidents and scenes. The late sequence involving an end of year show at the French language school all the McMansion kids attend seems anticlimactic even with Zenia standing in dramatically for the cancer dad. But, this fits too: we were deceived if we were led to expect any more. This is a film about gullibility, and how people find whatever they want in the people available to them. And it does snow, gorgeously. Everything works very well here. But the filmmakers have chosen something controlled, and hence easy. One might compare a more challenging and challenged picture of desperation among the rich like Ursula Meier's amazing [url="https://www.flickfeast.co.uk/feature/sister-2012/"]Sister/L'enfant d'en haut[/url] with Kacey Motet Klein and Léa Seydoux.

Never Gonna Snow Again/Sniegu juz nigdy nie bedzie, 113 mins., debuted Sept. 6, 2020 at Venice, showing in over a dozen other festivals including Bergen, Cologne, Hamburg and Göteborg. Numerous nominations and one award. Poland's 2021 best foreign eintry. Screened for this review as part of the seven-film BAM Apr. 30-May 6, 2021 Kino Polska series. Distributed in the US by Kino Lorber.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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