Jacek Poniedzialek and Ostap Vakulyuk in “Ether.” credit: filmneweurope.com
The prolific Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi is a reliably smart and artful storyteller. He spent the sixties doing short films for TV, making his feature debut in 1969. He’s probably best known here for 1984’s A Year Of The Quiet Sun, but his terrific films generally don’t get wide distribution here.
His latest, Ether (Eter) (Poland, 2018) is a slow, dark and compelling variation on the Faust myth. At the turn of the 20th century, a wealthy young doctor (Jacek Poniedzialek) who has started experimenting with ether underestimates its effects and commits a seemingly unforgivable crime. But he’s mysteriously reprieved, escapes a bleak exile and becomes a military doctor for an Austrio-Prussian company on the Russian border. The opportunistic commander (Andrzej Chyra) understands he can fill a needed position while holding the doctor’s chequered past over his head for loyalty. The doctor is fascinated by the power to regulate pain through anesthesia (or not), and his experiments become more callously adventurous – he saves a young orphan (Ostap Vakulyuk) from poverty by employing him as his assistant, but eventually even he, too, reaches his limits.
The film looks beautiful – Zanussi and cinematographer Piotr Niemyjski alternate a bluish-gray clinical cast to the doctor’s surroundings with the rustic earthiness of the rest of the garrison itself, including the brothel, which, it turns out, is also in the doctor’s medical purview. The subject matter isn’t nearly as explicit as you might think, but just because Zanussi’s tasteful doesn’t mean he’s not effective – I kept thinking of David Cronenberg, who’s also capable of this kind of balance. And Poniedzialek creates a fascinating villain. I quite liked this film, and recommend it.
Periscope In The Bathtub 