Wojciech Has' THE HOURGLASS SANATORIUM (1973)

 ... Polish nightmare people, dude.

The Hourglass Sanatorium is a series of dreams, though it is probably all one big dream (unless I did understand one part correctly and we may be witnessing Josef, played by Now ickiness with equal parts awe, fright, amusement, intrigue and a kind of weary sense of being unsettled and energized by what he is discovering, in a series of timeliness going back and forth in time. 

The director Wojciech Has means for us to pick up pieces as the character goes along on the kind of Through the Looking Glass/Everything Everywhere All at Once Odyssey that is even more earthy and inexplicable but drenched in different parts of history and religious iconography (Alice didn't have to deal with that many dancing Orthodoz Jews, for one thing).

This is the kind of film I enjoyed a lot, but it has to be said it was more scene to scene, as Has keeps throwing bizarre and even conspiratorial characters, people who might have been out of different centuries that keep appearing to Josef and as he tries to figure out what the hell is going on, but then... who >is< this guy to start with? In the beginning he comes to a Sanatorium - of the title, we presume - and he is there to see his father. He is told he is dead, but actually not really (?) And then from there it seems that every room leads to another place and time, another mystery that looks grubby and unkempt and most women are horny and/or deranged and the men either want to show Josef something or he wants something from a book and papers he carries around, and... sure!

I feel like Tim Meadows in Walk Hard with this movie - No, Dewey, you dont want no part of this - as far as having something in front of me that is one of the most potent and mind-altering (and difficult) pieces of Surrealistic art produced in the 1970s (or just in Europe in the 20th century period). 

Someone else online compared it to the loopiness of Inland Empire (which also had a lot set in Poland and maybe this was an influence to Lynch) and that may be right, though not even with the conceit that film had of at least knowing this is an actress untethered in the bucket muck of a mystery around an unmade remake; someone else pointed to Gilliam and Brazil and the oddbaall, in your face absurdity and humor is there; and even Tarkovsky and his haunted post-society hellscapes can be surmised with many passages so dreamlike that it melds into something that is truly laced with the logic of a poem, where impressions of human behavior and rituals and things.

This is all to say I would recommend this to certain kinds of folks who are open to a movie that spreads out like an ungainly tree where there is a lot of time to explore every root and branch like the Polish equivalent of an absurdist detective goes around all the sticks and wood, and to others not at all. 

Take for example that big dinner set piece that is outdoors and where those dozens of people at night turns into a pure nightmare, but not a narrative, and then it suddenly goes back to being inside as Josef looks for the royalty, and uh... you really do have to give yourself over to what Has is on here, but why it worked for me isn't just the weirdness for its own sake but bexayse it is immaculately, carefully crafted and how Jan Nowicki, like Laura Dern for Lynch, makes us want to see where he will go next and how he will react. (He kind of reminds me of a more energetic Gabriel Byrne).

When you have a dream, the filmmaker means to show as much as tell us, nothing makes sense but we have to keep going through it.  For our father or our mother, whatever it might be, we should keep going as long as there is activity in our brain (or untill we find ourselves bsck where we started). For the Hourglass Sanatorium, there is a mystery that the protagonist is looking to unlock, but like when we have a dream or a nightmare you believe everything you see or hear no matter how ridiculous you become in it or how far humanity becomes untethered. If it is frustrating and at times it is because it gives less than a damn aboht explaining its transitions from set piece to set piece or why this man has no problem in giving in to what he is seeing.

Like, could I tell you what Mexico has to do with all of this? Colonialism? Maybe that is why people have all those guns? Why all the fog except it is Poland and really cold and murky? It even does become clear at around two thirds in Josef has become so unglued in his dreams he gets arrested for his unruly and anarchic dreams by some higher authority(!) Maybe I am not supposed to understand it, and that is okay when Has makes it all so vivid and strange. Or maybe on another viewing - preferably in a theater and not in my apartment - everything about this odyssey in and out of time and religion and space and mannequins will click.

And that poster!