The Hourglass Sanatorium (no 7)

by Allan Fish

(Poland 1973 124m) DVD2

Aka. Sanatorium podklepsydra

Here he hasn’t yet died

p  Wojciech Has  d/w  Wojciech Has  stories  Bruno Schulz  ph  Witold Sobocinski  ed  Wojciech Has  m  Jerzy Maskymiuk  art  Andrzej Plocki, Jerzy Sjarzynski

Jan Nowicki (Józef), Gustaw Holoubek (Dr Gotard), Tadeusz Kondrat (Jakub, Józef’s father), Halina Kowalska (Adela), Irena Orska (Józef’s mother), Mieczyslaw Voit (blind conductor), Bozena Adamek (Bianca), Janina Sokolowska (nurse),

Anyone who has seen Wojciech Has’s earlier phantasmagoria The Saragossa Manuscript would find it hard to believe that Has would later make another masterwork even more surreal than its predecessor.  Likewise, I’m sure that when filming stopped on Andrzej Zulawski’s The Third Part of the Night, lead actor Jan Nowicki would have been forgiven for thinking that he’d just made the weirdest film he would ever be in.  Lesson to learn – never presume anything!

            Ostensibly the plot of Sanatorium surrounds the journey made by Józef, who arrives after a long train journey at his destination, a seemingly derelict sanatorium out in the middle of nowhere where his dying father is being treated.  He’s told soon after his arrival that his father, though actually dead in Józef’s world, he’ll be brought back to life as time can be altered in the sanatorium (in the Doctor’s words, they “reactivate time past with all its possibilities”). 

            From the very first shot, however, we know something’s wrong.  Something’s not as it should be.  Józef is on board a train travelling towards the sanatorium, and yet somehow we don’t feel like we’re on a train.  The scenery passing by the window is passing by so slowly, and so jumpily, as to make one think we were rather travelling on an old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage.  Inside, many of the passengers are asleep – one even wonders if some might not be dead – and then there are the female passengers.  The women are all topless.  In a railway carriage with shabby, disintegrating upholstery they are topless.  And the conductor on the train is blind.  All very nightmarish, and it only gets stranger on his arrival at the sanatorium.  The building looks like one might imagine Miss Havisham’s ideal home to look like, were she alive in the 20^th century.  The décor inside reminds one of a sixties municipal baths, corridors shoot off at bizarre angles, doors atop staircases seem as if they’ve been hijacked from a mausoleum, and what looks like a dining room – only looking like they haven’t served anyone in a few hundred years – adjoins a graveyard.  From the outset, one has the feeling that it isn’t the father who’s dying, it’s Józef.  And more than just Józef; the entire Jewish way of life in Poland, as if the entire building is a stopping point for the Yiddish dead.  Time stands still, and indeed goes back and drifts into the present, in much the same way as one imagines it would in a dream or like an extended flashback before the very moment of our death, suspended in time.  Little wonder Józef is heard to mutter aloud “why do I feel as if I’ve already been here, a long time ago?”  And then, yet again, there’s the women, for like on the train, all the young women are either naked or in some form of semi-undress, some as if in a state of hypnosis, the personification of erotic fantasies played out after the event.  Romantic longings of what might have been and wasn’t.  When it ends, it’s as if Józef has died.  Fade literally to black. 

            It’s all one interpretation, and no more important than the next fellow’s, but part of Sanatorium’s magic is the way it leaves itself open to endless speculation and interpretation, much as a dream would to different psychiatrists.  The design of the house – and a truly unforgettable steam boat, equally decrepit, populated by mannequin-like historical figures and similarly overgrown with plant-life – is worth an essay of its own, and Nowicki’s performance, equal parts bamboozled and bamboozling, is a joy.  What really stays with you and haunts you, though, is the look of the film, coated in a green decaying rinse like a layer of moss on a headstone.  Even the credits are in green.