Never Gonna Snow Again

The more money in the bank account, the more tension in the neck. This is the impression one might get in the anonymous villa estate on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the taciturn Ukrainian Zhenia (Alec Utgoff) delights his clientele with his healing hands. Zhenia not only provides a welcome change in the gated community, but also a welcome break from the monotony. For half an hour, he can free people from their loneliness, inner emptiness and feelings of weariness, giving them comfort and confidence. For the spiritually homeless and sexually frustrated nouveau riche, the masseur from the prefabricated housing estate becomes a kind of guru. Especially when a flashback reveals that Zhenia grew up in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl and had to witness the reactor catastrophe as a seven-year-old. This profound social satire by Polish filmmakers Małgorzata Szumowska (Silver Bear for “Body”, 2015) and Michał Englert celebrated its premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival. In “The Masseur”, Szumowska and Englert also dealt with their experience of growing up in communist Poland, which rushed towards capitalism in the 1990s. According to the filmmakers, the gated community symbolizes the malaise of a generation of the newly rich in Poland who, after the hardships of communism, “desperately cling to the signifiers of their newfound wealth”. (Wikipedia) “Thus, the concentrated narrative rhythm combines light and satirical elements in the depictions of the nouveau riche, who are never denounced, with intimations of trauma and the mystical. In short, lyrically enraptured sequences, the film repeatedly plunges us into the inner worlds of his clients as well as into Zhenia's enigmatic dreams. The floating melodies of Max Richter's “Sleep” also contribute to the fact that not only the people in the film fall into a trance-like state. [...] “The Masseur” refrains from esoteric swearing, it tells of riddles with ironic refractions, but in images that are no less poetic for that. It allows for different interpretations. He also suggests a political interpretation of his story, with the gated community as a symbol for the isolation of classes, countries or even “Fortress Europe”. The most beautiful thing, however, is the sensitivity with which Szumowska places all the aspects and ambivalences in an aesthetic context and brings them into flow, with a love for details, for her characters and for the illusionary games of cinema.” (Patrick Seyboth, on: epd-film.de)