"There definitely needs to be a balance struck between the financial sector and scientists. Because the way it's affecting certainly climate change and just generally, I think people's lives - everything is becoming, I feel with the consumerist culture, people are losing control, and losing connection." ~ Alec Utgoff
Actor Alec Utgoff masterfully weaves his way through the lives inhabiting a humorless Polish community, as an inadvertently seductive masseur - the ethnic Russian Ukrainian immigrant Zhenia on an elusive psychological or even political mission.
Perhaps cynically equating all longings for a better world with magical thinking, whether political, emotional, obsessive consumerism or the fleeting frustration of a massage, the film teases then seems to settle on a fateful dystopia in store for the human race. But in any case, a combo playful and sobering prophetic perspective on the way things are, or progressively will be.
As for Zhenia, his rare revelation in the evasive narrative proceedings regarding his favored sports players back home as the Donetsk team - that ethnically Russian breakaway self-declared communist republic currently at war with Ukraine - may indicate a surprising clue to the entire preceding mystery at work. Or considering everything else that has transpired, maybe not.
Written and directed with subversive nihilistic glee by Małgorzata Szumowska.
Here's Alec Utgoff, phoning in from London in a decidedly enigmatic conversation about the film.
Prairie Miller
