Cycle index

Life As a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease

dir. Krzysztof Zanussi / Poland 2000 / 105’

subtitles: English

retrospective: Krzysztof Zanussi A Plane from Budapest, Anxiety, Attestation, Behind the Wall, Camouflage, Cement and Words, Face to Face, Family Life, Girl and Uhlan, Hipothesis, Holden, Illumination, Imperative, In Full Gallop, Inventory, Krzysztof Zanussi – Essential Conversations, Life As a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease, Long Conversation with a Bird, Mountains at Dusk, Persona non grata, Revisit, Spiral, Stop Thief, Students, The Balance, The Bluebeard, The Catamount Killing, The Constant Factor, The Contract, The Death of a Provincial, The Lady with the Ermine, The Lame Devil, The Power of Evil, The Role, The Roof, The Silent Touch, The Structure of Crystal, The Tram to Heaven, The Unapproachable, The Year of Quiet Sun, Time That Passed, Umbrella, Ways in the Night, Wherever You Are, With a Warm Heart, A Woman’s Business, Deceptive Charm Section index

Cast

Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Krystyna Janda, Tadeusz Bradecki, Monika Krzykowska, Paweł Okraska, Aleksander Fabisiak, Szymon Bobrowski, Krzysztof Zanussi

Film description

After the premiere of Life as... critics wrote of the master's come-back and Marcel Łoziński, a member of the jury at the Gdańsk festival, describes it as an excellent renewed debut. Zanussi returns to a personal, quiet and emotional tone of cinema expression, to eschatological issues Zanussi once referred to in Spiral and to his former character: a contemporary Polish intellectual, mature and terribly cynical, played - as before - by Zbigniew Zapasiewicz. Life as... is a story about Tomasz Berg, a doctor who suffers from an incurable disease himself. The imminence of death changes the main character's attitude. On the one hand it allows him insolent and unpunished sincerity to everybody (including his superiors) and on the other - it teaches him transcendence. Berg's dying is shown in a straightforward way: physiologically, and yet somehow it remains an encounter with the sacred sphere. Berg is a pronounced atheist and yet his atheism is full of doubts; it turns out to be mask and disappears confronted with the end.In the background we follow the story of a medical student and his girlfriend, developed by the director in his next film, The Supplement (2002). The two meet with Berg by incident and the encounter is very fruitful.

Mirella Napolska