Review of The Hourglass Sanatorium

An army of clockwork manikins re-enacts the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Villagers dressed as exotic birds twirl through a spontaneous arcane festival. Your childhood best-friend bars your access to his stamp collection of lies. Your father comes back from the dead to ask if there has been any mail. You are in the Hourglass Sanatorium; a place inside you mind and outside of time.

Nearly a decade after the Polish auteur directed his exquisite structural masterpiece, “The Saragossa Manuscript,” Wojciech Has was still uncompromisingly upturning every narrative convention he could find with “The Hourglass Sanatorium” (1973). I sought out the portentous-sounding title, despite the fact that none of his films, save “Saragossa Manuscript,” have grown in reputation enough to get Region 1 DVD releases. I urge everyone to do the same.

The story is as much about the protagonist, Josef, as it is about the time-traveling convalescence home where he is summoned upon news of his father’s death. The hospital is overgrown and decaying, almost as if it has already traveled to the ends of eternity and back. Most of the sets are symbolism-choked still life arrangements featuring cobwebs, skulls, debris, clocks, taxidermy and ancient leaflets. The architecture is vague, misleading and transitory.

When Josef arrives, he discovers that though Jakob (his father) has died relative to the timeline of the outside world, things are not so simple in the Hourglass Sanatorium. Staring out the window, he notices himself arriving earlier that day, but by a different means. He rushes to meet himself, but bumps into his mother, who addresses him at the age of eight. Not so much trapped in, as irresistibly bound to the paradoxical sanatorium, Josef is doomed (treated?) to a series of adventures that borrow unpredictably from his past, his fantasies and his nightmares.

Jan Nowicki, as Josef, gives it his wide-eyed delusional all, selling a character that seems infinitely more comfortable in the shifting landscape than the audience will ever get. It is, after all, an environment that mixes freely with his innermost mind. A lesser director might have made Josef’s psyche-made-flesh journey a mere study of parental relations and childhood trauma, but when Has flays open the human brain, he dissects more than a cheap Freudian thriller. There is no final-act key that unlocks Josef’s secrets for our own satisfaction. Instead, the ending twist creates a disturbing circularity that may lock Josef away forever.

Wojciech Has keeps his scattershot tale from becoming arbitrary chaos by binding it with Heart of Darkness atmosphere and reoccurring references that imply a personal history never truly glimpsed reliably. Most striking of all is Has’s seductive constructive editing, linking impossible locals with seamless, yet startlingly, transitions. The narrative operates as if it were Josef’s dream (as it very well may be), carrying us forward into new situations without leaving any memory of how we got there.

You know it’s a good thing when you can’t make up your mind whether the directing, the art design or the editing is the source of a film’s technical brilliance. I think it’s safe to say that for this one, all three contribute enormously. It is exhausting just to take in the film with the eyes, but where it really provides a workout is in the mind. Has has created a platform for viewers to try out dozens of theories and, no matter how crazy the conjecture, he never leaves us lacking for evidence.

Walrus Rating: 8.5

P.S. If anyone out there knows where I can find any Wojciech Has films other than “The Saragossa Manuscript” and this one, please let me know. He is fast becoming a favorite, but his work seems unjustly unavailable.