52 Films by Women Vol 5. 52. NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN (Directors: Malgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert)
Back in 2020, when
the Polish film Never Gonna
Snow Again (Śniegu juž nigdy nie bedzie) debuted at film festivals, it resonated
differently than it does now. Two years on, its Ukrainian protagonist is
classified as belonging to a brave nation willing to defend its values to the
point of annihilation against the paranoid ravings of a Russian President.
Zhenia (Alec Utgoff, who projects the air of an East European Patrick Swayze,
and looks good in a leotard too) is a masseur whose clients belong to a gated
community of wealthy but troubled families who live just outside an unnamed city.
Zhenia walks from his apartment, with its broken set of blinds, all the way to
his place of work, symbolically passing through a traffic barrier. Here lies a
community whose children are sent to the École Française, not because the parents speak French
but because they want their children to do so. Every doorbell is classically
themed, every door decorated with a wreath.
Director Małgorzata Szumowska, who
co-writes and shares direction credit with the cinematographer, Michał Englert, has previously
made a film about a charismatic man amongst a group of young women, The Other Lamb, her English language debut released in 2019.
She has since made her second English language film, Infinite Storm with Naomi Watts and has another film, All Inclusive, in post-production – Szumowska is one of
the busiest female directors working in cinema today. Her films are, for the
most part, not strong on plot. They work on a slow burn and leave the audience
to ponder their themes.
Here the charismatic
stranger, Zhenia, is more benevolent than The Other Lamb’s Shepherd
(Michiel Huisman). When we first meet him, Zhenia steps out of the woods – the
camera tilts up from black and reveals him in long shot – before he walks away
from us through a barren urban landscape, riding an elevator by himself,
crossing a bridge while appearing to affect the lighting and walking through a
tunnel. We see him climb the crowded stairs of a municipal building and present
himself to an official. ‘I want to work here,’ he tells the elderly gentleman,
whose office he enters without knocking. The elderly official looks at Zhenia.
‘You’ve been here before.’ Zhenia walks behind the man, puts his hands on the
man’s ears then sends him to sleep. He signs and stamps his own form, before edging
his way downstairs. The opening of the film is almost forgettable; we never see
this space again. For the most part, the action takes place in a well-appointed
estate of white-walled houses. No graffiti, no evidence of economically driven social
ills. There are, however, pampered children, alcoholism, loneliness and cancer.
How does Zhenia get
his first customer? It isn’t clear. In any case, the film operates outside realism.
In two scenes, Zhenia appears to have a telekinetic power to make objects move
by themselves, though this gift is never used for dramatic purposes. His
clients are mostly women: housewife Maria (Maja Ostaszewska), first seen in a
balloon-and-bottle-filled house, the morning after a birthday party, nudging
her school-age son with her foot. Her husband picks the boy up. Maria has a
young daughter who demands juice and an i-pad and calls her mother a ‘whore’.
Silver-haired Ewa (Agata Kulesza) has a son, who watches Zhenia dumbfounded as
he pirouettes, ballet style around the house, having put Ewa to sleep after she
requests sex. The most sympathetic character is a father (Lukasz Simlat) who
seeks relief from his cancer; his wife, Wika (Weronika Rosati) looks at Zhenia
sympathetically. Finally there is a woman who keeps three bulldogs (Katarzyna
Figura) who asks Zhenia to massage one of them. ‘I’ve never massaged a dog
before,’ protests Zhenia before getting to work. The dog farts in Zhenia’s
face.
There is tension.
Zhenia is told by a neighbour that two men are looking for him. Maria sees
Zhenia with another woman and is jealous. There is an army man (Andrzej Chyra) who
has just moved in, whose car collides with the bike of a local youth. He
eventually hires Zhenia. During the massage, the man’s life as a UN Peacekeeper
flashes before us. Does Zhenia experience this insight or is this flashback
just for our benefit? It isn’t entirely clear.
Dog farts aside,
Zhenia’s impromptu dance is one of the few comic sequences. In another, Zhenia
tries to engage Maria’s son is conversation. ‘Are you a football fan?’ he asks,
adding that his favourite team is Shakhtar Donetsk. The boy freaks out. There
is a running motif of men on Segways patrolling the estate. Late in the film,
Zhenia rides one with the barrier operator who repeatedly offered him a cup of
chai.
In one scene, Zhenia
stares at a wall where a picture hangs of a woman sitting with her back to us.
The camera zooms in and we are taken into a flashback in Pripyat, near
Chernobyl, where Zhenia grew up. Zhenia watched his mother die, lying on a
gurney-type bed much like the one he uses for his clients. One could infer that
in treating rich women, he is trying to atone for not being able to bring his
mother back to life.
Zhenia’s clients
muse that their masseur might be radioactive. Maria’s husband wonders whether
Zhenia likes women – Zhenia can certainly use his power on them. In a night-time
scene, we see a moustachioed long-haired male dancer perform erotically behind
glass, naked save for a pair of shoes and underpants. The shot is held for a
long time before the camera moves along and we see Zhenia watching a semi-naked
woman dance. The woman’s modesty is protected; the reflection of Zhenia’s face,
lit with red light, is superimposed on her body so that we concentrate on his
expression of wonder. The question of Zhenia’s sexuality is settled later on;
there is indeed a sex scene. He becomes a very different type of substitute in a
magic show, wearing a tight outfit.
The two men looking
for him are revealed to be immigration officers. They call on Maria. ‘Did he do
anything wrong?’ she asks them. They don’t answer. The ending of the film is a
mystery, though there is one decisive dramatic development that demonstrates
that massages only provide temporary relief; they don’t ‘fix’ problems.
I briefly wondered
whether Zhenia might be asked to act as an inside man to steal from his
clients. However, he never at any point exploits them. It is significant that
all of the characters are gathered for the magic show. Maria’s daughter asks to
share her mother’s drink. ‘You won’t like it,’ she replies. During the show
Maria is told, ‘they can see you’, referring to her alcoholic behaviour. The
army man is also present.
The title of the
film refers to a line of dialogue, reflecting the anxiety that it might never
indeed snow again. Snow has literal and metaphoric connotations, the latter
referring to radioactive ash that fell on Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster.
It is not a spoiler to say that snow falls again, though this might be
connected to the outcome of the magic show. Prior to this, we see Zhenia in his
tight outfit pixilate into purple dust.
Is Never Gonna Snow Again a satire? It doesn’t play like one. It does,
quite literally, take us round the houses, avoiding a resolution. The film
doesn’t address why Zhenia works abroad, other than to exploit his exotic charm
and escape reminders of his mother. Moreover, it doesn’t address why he avoids
an intimate relationship. When asked directly, he remarks that he is too busy. Zhenia
has a moral compass, telling tells a boy that he shouldn’t speak to his mother rudely.
He is then rebuked. There is a heavy dose of pathos, but we have felt slightly
at a remove from both Zhenia and the people he treats. The only resolution is
that the dogs that bark when Zhenia passes – that’s just the way they greet
you, he is told – do become friendly, Zhenia eventually petting a dog. I’m not
sure this counts as the fulfilment of a dramatic arc.
Reviewed on Mubi
(home streaming service), Sunday 17 April 2022 (Easter Day)
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