Never gonna Snow Again is a film full of ingredients. A psychic masseur from Ukraine. A gated community on the edge of Warsaw. Peopled by the dissociated upper middle class. A teacher dying of cancer. A woman in love with her bulldogs. A frustrated mum. A racist ex UN peacekeeper. Kids home-cooking MDMA tablets. A little bit of everything that makes the modern world go around. The film is beautifully shot, with every frame composed and lit with real flair. The only hitch is that the narrative itself doesn’t really make the most of all these ingredients. The film strolls around the gated community, following Zenia, the masseur, as he soothes souls and muscles, and charms the locals to no particular end. There is a suggestion at the film’s conclusion that this is all about immigration, with Poland now part of the promised EU land which Zenia uses his gifts to infiltrate. But unlike Ramussen’s Flee, which treads similar territory, the film backs away from any kind of emotional involvement. Zenia remains a blank canvas of a figure, who literally vanishes one day, never to return. The overall effect is of a film brimful of ideas which never quite amount to as much as they might have done. Watching it on the day Godard’s death was announced, it was hard not to think about how the aesthetisisation of cinema sometimes works against any more polemical or discursive ambitions it might aspire to, something Godard was well aware of and fought against.
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