In Wojciech Has' adaptation of Bruno Schulz' short stories, time plays tricks and dreams come to life as a man visits his not quite dead father in an otherworldly sanatorium
"Everything is muddled up, Father. One needs such patience to find the right meaning in this tangle."
So says Jozef (Nowicki) to his father Jakub (Kondrat) in the middle of Wojciech Has' Hourglass Sanatorium, no doubt articulating the thoughts of many a viewer by this point. For Jakub is in fact dead, but his life has been supernaturally prolonged in an isolated and dilapidated sanatorium, located alongside a cemetery (or perhaps in the subconscious). The residing doctor (Holoubek) has put the clocks back to reactivate the past in all its unfulfilled possibilities and missed opportunities.
After a long, sleepy train journey surrounded by corpse-like Hassids and naked women, Jozef has arrived at these dusty corridors in search of both his lost father and some sort of meaning for his own life, but he is soon, much like the doctor with the pretty nurse (Sokolowska), distracted from his task by considerations of a more erotic nature - and more particularly by his fanciful encounters with two women, voluptuous Adela (Kowelska) and spectral Bianka (Adamek). For in this tomb-like sanatorium where time has been reversed, memories run parallel to dreams, desires and fantasies, even if ultimately all these branch lines and sidetracks lead to the same inevitable terminus.
If Jakob comes to regard the past as the 'text' of God's will, misinterpreted or emended at the reader's peril, and if his uncanny adventures are all prompted by books that he has encountered in his youth, whether a scrapbook of catalogue advertisements, a stamp album owned by a childhood friend (Zylber), his father's collection of bird illustrations, or the Old Testament itself, all this serves in part as a reflex for the literary origins of Has's film.
The Polish director had already acquired a reputation as a skilled adaptor of 'unfilmable' books with his dizzying The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), and in Hourglass Sanatorium, he turned his attentions to several of the linked short stories collected in 'Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass', published by celebrated Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz in 1937.