Never Gonna Snow Again

Alec Utgoff plays an enigmatic masseur in Poland's 2021 entry for the foreign language Oscars.

Alec Utgoff and Agata Kulesza

Over the past decade the Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska has made her name with films that have always favoured provocative material and have become increasingly off-beat too. In the process her work, which involves her as writer as well as director, has tended to move away from naturalism towards fable and this latest offering, which finds her sharing both credits with her photographer Michal Englert, exists very much in a world of its own. That’s so even if it reflects on life as we know it. At the same time the key characteristic of the film is its deliberately enigmatic quality.

Never Gonna Snow Again is a contemporary tale set in Poland but with an outsider as its central figure. This is a young man named Zhenia (Alec Utgoff, who plays Dr Alexei in Stranger Things) who has arrived there from the Ukraine and has set himself up as a masseur. He has clients, many of them women, who live in a gated community and their affluent life-style is seen in contrast with his own lowly abode in an urban block. Zhenia may start off just offering massage but soon he provides hypnosis too and in this way he enables his clients to bring to the surface their fears and regrets.

Some critics have made comparisons with Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem in which a mysterious outsider played by Terence Stamp seduces all the members of a household in turn, be they female or male. He, like Zhenia, is a deeply ambiguous figure, his provenance unexplained, but even if Zhenia’s comfort can lead to sex that element is very much played down here. Indeed, good as Utgoff is and central though Zhenia be, Never Gonna Snow Again is arguably more about those who employ him than about Zhenia himself. Brief flashbacks to his past hardly clarify anything and it’s up to the viewer to decide whether or not his background links to Chernobyl and his use of Russian phrases when inducing hypnosis carry any significance or not.

The social conditions that characterise life in Poland seem more to the point since the contrast in life-style between Zhenia and his clients serves to underline the fact that attaining material things does not bring happiness with it. To compensate for the dissatisfaction that persists among those who are well-off, some seek solace in religion and others find it through drugs, while it could be thought that those who turn to Zhenia are also using him to help them to cope. That is, however, merely my personal take on it because this film undoubtedly invites any number of interpretations and never imposes any specific viewpoint that would clarify its aims.

Provided that you are somebody ready to find this enigmatic approach engaging, this film will attract you, its appeal enhanced by the adept editing, fine photography and a very adroit use of music. However, it does seem to falter somewhat late on when it devotes rather too much time to the staging of a magic act in which Zhenia becomes involved. This episode ends neatly but it is far less individual than what has preceded it evoking as it does, albeit in passing, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006). Furthermore, what follows, a kind of coda, is an anti-climax. Nevertheless, I found much more here to like than to dislike. However, the film’s nature is such that reactions are bound to vary and, if some will like it much less than I did, others may will take to it far more.

Original title: Sniegu już nigdy nie będzie.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Cast: Alec Utgoff, Maja Ostaszewska, Agata Kulesza, Weronika Rosati, Katarzyna Figura, Łukasz Simlat, Andrzej Chyra, Krzysztof Czeczot, Maciej Drosio, Olaf Marchwicki, Konstantin Solowiow, Andrzej Pankowski.

Dir Malgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, Pro Malgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert, Viola Fügen, Agnieszka Wasiak, Michael Weber and Mariusz Wlodarski, Screenplay Malgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, Ph Michał Englert, Pro Des Jagna Janicka, Ed Agata Cierniak and Jarosław Kamiński, Costumes Katarzyna Lewinska.

Lava Films/Match Factory Productions/Kino Swiat/DI Factory-Picturehouse Entertainment.
115 mins. Poland/Germany/Netherlands. 2020. Rel: 15 October 2021. Cert. 15.