Le masseur

A fascinating collection of quirky people, intriguing stories, social commentary and a mystery surrounding the masseur and spiritual healer Zenia (Alec Utgoff) who seems to have some special powers after surviving the Chernobyl disaster as a child. The central mystery keeps you intrigued, while the film explores the stories of the wealthy fenced-off neighbourhood (a very good Polish cast). I really liked the fairy-tale feeling of the film and the masterfully done dream-like hypnosis scenes (which looked amazing). The film doesn't feel larger than the sum of it parts though - the individual various elements work very well but in the end you don't necessarily get a satisfying pay-off to it all, it just drifts off like a dream. A worth effort from the Polish cinema.

Beautiful fairytale with mesmerasing structure, story and acting. I loved especially the chernobyl thread.

Zhenia, (Alec Utgoff), is a kind of itinerant masseur who's also something of a shamen. He was born in Chernobyl seven years to the day before the accident and as a client suggests he may be radioactive. He's now plying his trade around a fancy gated estate in Poland, the kind of place where the Stepford Wives might live. There's no backstory to Zhenia other than he can hypnotise people and momentarily take over their lives, (that's how he seems to have got his work permit), and Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert's wonderful film "Never Gonna Snow Again" could be a Polish 'Wizard of Oz' before Dorothy came on the scene as Zhenia makes himself at home in other people's houses, bending them to his will while simultaneously becoming a little like them for a time.

'Realism' in the conventional sense is conspicuously absent. I mean, how did Zhenia get in touch with these clients, all living within walking distance of each other in this strangely bland community? What's his purpose there and who exactly is he and why can he move a glass across a table without touching it? Teasingly these are questions Szumowska and Englert want us to ask without giving us any answers.

Naturally, it's a comedy and a rather black one though it's never particularly funny. Whimsical would be a better term. It might even remind you a little of Pasolini's "Theorem" and visually it's often quite extraordinary. That it slipped by, virtually unnoticed, even in the art-house circuit, is a shame since it is totally engaging from start to finish. Do try to see it.

Carrying a massage table and wandering out of mysterious woods, our hero, Zhenia, enters a Polish government building, meets an official in a wood-panelled office, renders him unconscious with a massage/hypnosis and signs his own residence permit. The official has a record player in the office and, as Zhenia leaves, the needle drops of its own accord and music starts.

We are surely in the presence of some magical being, here to do great and/or terrible things, right? Well, not really. All he does is become the house masseur for a gated community of McMansions with unusually tasteful interiors. He seems to be good at his job, even very good, but the only time he does actual magic is back at his drab, tower-block bedsit, and all it is is moving a glass across the table with his mind.

The trick is surely a reference to Tarkovsky's Stalker, in which the stalker's child does the same, and perhaps the point is that Chernobyl, where Zhenia grew up, is an awful real-life version of that earlier film's Zone - an area that looks like ordinary countryside, but is under some kind of mysterious, likely sinister enchantment.

It's all very intriguing, the cast of characters is comically and vividly drawn, both in terms of writing and acting, and visually it's a masterclass, every frame an absolute beaut.

But what's it all for? There's a touch, as another reviewer notes, of Pasolini's Teorema, and of the classic old short story The Distributor. But where those are about the interloper in a community determinedly bringing ruin, Zhenia, by comparison, and the film's writers, seem to lack any clear sense of purpose.

The only point seems to be a letdown: Zhenia, unable to save his mother, who appears to have died of cancer after Chernobyl, realises - particularly when one of his clients also dies of cancer - that he's not going to be able to save anyone here either. But it's not like he tried all that hard and why, anyway, did he make his focus this little enclave of privilege in Poland of all places? Sorry, but if the aim is to say something about the horror and tragedy of an event like Chernobyl, this in no way cuts it.

Maybe the point is more to say that, in the face of the world's traumas, and of serious illnesses like cancer, our modern social-media-driven culture of wellness treatments and candy-coated minimalist interiors is, well, a tad pathetic, precious and, at worst, prone to magical thinking. And, if so, well, OK, but the argument seems obvious to the point of being trite, and the consequences of the wrongheadedness don't hit home hard enough to seem to matter much.

I'm thinking it wasn't all completely thought through, and the result is, for all the brilliant detail, this thing drags terribly as it goes on.

You realise seeing stuff like this the greatness of directors like Kubrick, Lynch, Tarkovsky and Fellini, able to do the stunning visuals, but also marry them with a brilliant story. Elsewhere in the lesser reaches of the arthouse universe, the more common reality is as here: a ton of promise, but ultimate disappointment.

There is a certain sense of strangeness throughout the film, a certain touch of fantasy that reminds us especially of Jonathan Glazer. Not many things are explained about the main character, and especially in the final section the magical elements end up absorbing the traditional narrative, but the film as a whole has a touch of fantastic cinema, of universality in its proposal, which makes it the most affordable than Malgorzata Szumowska has made to date.