I will remember that the main actor of this picture is named Zbigniew Zapasiewicz. I saw him some twenty years younger in Camouflage and loved his cunning ability to project different personas. Here, in the bombastically titled  Life As a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease, he plays a dying doctor’s last months. Given that this is Poland, death is intertwined with questions regarding God. Direct and therefore less subtle, the film looks from the point of view of a character who went through three historic life changes, the war, the totalitarian communist regime and the post ‘89 period. I overheard Radu Muntean saying once that directors are either consumed by their subject or, if they can rise above it, manage to consume the subject themselves. In this case it feels as if Zanussi was in the first category. 

As a sidenote, a quote from Murakami - 1Q84, highlighted by 1524 readers on Kindle: “That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”