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)