Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease

Bodi

Una reflexión piadosa sobre nuestro mayor enigma,magistral

Rui

Simple, real, touching.

Korial

Profoundly religious. Zanussi masterfully avoids any convoluted discourses and the use of overly dramatic tones. The result, a monastic account of mankind struggle in this existence. A masterpiece which is a prayer chanted in tears.

EdieEmm

The process of reckoning with death begins (with) the process of reconciling ones life. The messy human passage through (& the centrality of) that subjective, dialectical process. Anyway, the living need to experience death to know life, so it’s a gift too, isn’t it? Even a sacrifice. W/ Parajanov-inspired interjections of/by the transcendent; a little Bergman; and an extraordinary performance by Zapasiewicz. 3.75

msmichel

Zanussi looks into the abyss with this wonderful film about mortality, faith and acceptance. Zbigniew Zapasiewicz is spectacular here as an aged physician suffering from inoperable cancer who must accept his fate and struggle with the concept of faith. The script is perhaps Zanussi's most approachable and certainly his most humanistic.

José Neves

PC. The film within the film is a Catholic parable that reproduces itself in the film much less directly, by levels of repudiation of the ultimate path that leads believers to their abode: death. The whole film is more a discussion and fear's disturbance than an acceptance, and what Zanussi magnificently performs, like some Ermanno Olmis' films, is to build a materia(l) exystence in(to) a non-materia/faith system.

Katya Kazbek

Poetic simplicity; a more contemporary, Eastern European, cynical and Catholic take on The Seventh Seal.

angeldromero

A reflection on mortality. Sublime film that deals with acceptance of death and many fundamental questions of the last moments of a man's existence. A must watch film by Zanussi. “I believe that one cannot appreciate life without appreciating death.”