The masseur comes from the depths of the forest. He crosses a street, climbs the stairs of an authority and enters an office. An old civil servant is supposed to issue him a work permit. But there is something strange about the application. The young man did not indicate which languages he speaks. “I speak to everyone,” he says with a still face. Whereupon the officer, who in the meantime seems to have become grayer and older, lets go of all formalities and turns to him with a whimpering voice: “Please, help me.”
The applicant cannot be told twice. He gets up and begins to massage the officer, who immediately relaxes under his hands – and falls asleep. But the official act has not yet been completed, so the young man, who comes from Ukraine, puts a signature and a stamp on the document authorizing him to work in Poland himself.
The mysterious physiotherapist is called Zhenia (Alec Utgoff) and is sent by Małgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert in their contribution to last year’s Venice Film Festival – German distribution title: “The Masseur” – to an ailing humanity. The friendly but mysterious hand lay-on’s place of work is a gated community near Warsaw, through whose gate he walks every morning.
He carries his massage table on his back, which he sets up in the living rooms of the settlement. His clientele consists of the sad and very tense flesh of late capitalism. The wealth has lost its luster, in this row of villas, each house is like the other, the residents only stay on their feet thanks to the regular intake of psychotropic drugs and intoxicants.
Like every messiah, this masseur is a fake one
The housewife, overwhelmed with raising children, the man suffering from cancer and the grim ex-military: they all need help, care and relaxation. And Zhenia always performs the same ritual. With his fingers he feels the stress, the suffering, the pain that has accumulated in the bodies, in their muscles, fasciae and tendons, and lets them flow away through his fingers. Or so he claims, in a soft, mumbling voice. Then the patients fall asleep immediately, peacefully and relieved.
The masseur is therefore at the same time a hypnotist and also a kind of messiah, although – like every messiah – a false one. On the one hand, because then he is only a masseur: a flexing of the muscles and a little hypnosis only provide temporary relief before misery returns with consciousness. And then there is the thing about dreams. Usually people dream of the Savior. With Szumowska and Englert it is the Redeemer himself who has dreams. With which he, who lives in the barren room of a prefabricated building, is hungry for the redemption that he was supposed to bring.
Zhenia’s dreams revolve around the past, his (deceased) mother and Chernobyl, where he was born, right at the time of the great nuclear disaster, in the zone of highest radioactivity. It is striking how much the filmmakers relate to the work of Andrei Tarkowski in these short dream sequences. A woman sits on a fence smoking, her gaze averted from us, like at the beginning of “Der Spiegel”. A child, with its head on the table, uses telekinetic force to move a glass to the edge, as in the final sequence of “Stalker”.
There was no longer any salvation in the work of the great Russian filmmaker. There was, however, a poetic force in cinema that sustained belief in a spiritual world “behind” the visible. Szumowska and Englert first invoke this remnant of hope in a scene in an astonishingly precise manner and then cancel it again. The masseur, too, lets a glass wander across the table through sheer power of thought, as in “Stalker”, but then it immediately wanders back to him. As if in truth he could never have moved it.
The scene is self-revealing: In the tidy shimmering dull blue-gray shots of the highly conceptual film by Szumowska and Englert, the poetic power of the cinema no longer has a place. As if the two wanted to show that no one can believe in this power anymore – not in view of the problems of today’s world. It is as if the depression of the present has finally found its way into art and this film.
Rather, Szumowska and Englert reveal the sins that the privileged part of humanity commits while locking out the less privileged part: Pakistani food suppliers are mocked, SUVs hit passers-by, trees are felled instead of planted. The warning sign of climate change is omnipresent. A sentence is repeated like a mantra: “It will never snow again.” No coming Messiah who, like Zhenia, “speaks all languages” will redeem humanity from the ecocide for which it is responsible. The only invisible, future image that is still waiting for the people here, which is hidden behind the frosty shell of this wintry film, we already have clearly before our eyes today: the image of a world in flames.
Never gonna snow again, Poland / Germany 2020. – Direction and script: Małgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert. Camera: Englert. With Alec Utgoff, Agata Kulesza. Maja Ostazewska. Real fiction, 113 minutes.