Product Details

• Actors: Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Krystyna Janda, Pawel Okraska, Monika Krzywkowska, Michal Sieczkowski
• Directors: Krzysztof Zanussi
• Format: PAL
• Subtitles: English, French, German
• Region: Region 2 (Read more about DVD formats.)
• Number of discs: 2
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B002KP6EO4
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #598,963 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Set of two movies:
1. Life as a fatal sexually transmitted disease
2. Supplement
Number of disks: 2
Format: DVD-9
Region: 2 (PAL). European or multi-system DVD player is required to see this DVD.
Format: 4:3
Audio: DD 2.0
Language version: Polish
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish
DVD Extras: Intro, Krzysztof Zanussi about the movie, Director's and Actors' commendatory

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars What is happiness today?, August 7, 2009

By 

Polish Jazz Network (PolishJazz com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Krzysztof Zanussi - Life as a fatal sexually transmitted disease / Supplement (2-DVD set) (DVD)

In early 12th century France, a horse thief is captured in the outskirts of a peasant village and brought to the attention of a passing monk in order to receive absolution before being hanged for his crime. Momentarily released from his binding in order to pray, the thief seizes the opportunity to flee from the village before being quickly apprehended and returned to the waiting priest, who then informs the townspeople that he cannot give absolution to someone who is not ready for death. Instead, the monk offers to take the prisoner into his counsel at the monastery and agrees to bring him back for his punishment when he is able to accept his fate. One day, the prisoner returns to the village and solemnly approaches the clearing that leads to the gallows before a seemingly anachronistic on-set mishap reveals that the opening sequence had been a film-within-a-film excerpt from a work in progress on the early life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and his epic theological conflict with theologian Pierre Abélard (a conflict that eventually led to Abélard's condemnation under Pope Innocent II). The nebulous, inexact context of Saint Bernard's reassuring words to the condemned man reveals the underlying essential mystery of Krzysztof Zanussi's pensive and articulate film, Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease, as the divorced and childless Dr. Tomasz Berg (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz) - the film's standby physician - is forced to come to terms with his own mortality after discovering that he is suffering from an advanced stage of cancer. The film presents a thoughtful contemporary allegory for a culture that is striving to reconnect with its traditional spirituality (and along with the soul searching, the inevitable self-examination that accompanies the process as people struggle to reconcile with its continued relevance in a modern, technology-driven, and increasingly alienated society) after years of systematic religious marginalization under communism. Moreover, by chronicling Dr. Berg's personal journey of enlightenment, closure, and transcendence, Zanussi reflects the spiritual conflict embodied by Abélard and St. Bernard's inextricable theological conundrum: an irresolvable universal quest to find balance between reason and faith, humanity and spirituality, mortality and eternal life.

*****

SUPPLEMENT is the story of love between two young people. The boy is torn by doubt. He wants to avoid becoming average, one the many "rats" in the chase for material wealth. He thinks seriously about entering a monastery and is afraid of the toils of everyday life. The girl goes to night school and earns money as a dressing room attendant on film sets and during fashion shows. She honestly fears that she may be a barrier to the boy's self-fulfillment. She also wonders if she should not encourage him to be bolder in life.
One of the most moving films ever made, Supplement is writer-director Krzysztof Zanussi's deepening of Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (2000). Recycling the three most important characters, it covers the same period, hits several of the same scenes from the lives of these characters, including Dr. Tomasz Berg's death, but opens up, with new disclosures in some cases and in much greater detail in others, two aspects: medical student Filip's interior struggle to know the will of his God, and the course of his romantic relationship with Hanka. Supplement--or Suplement--also adds Filip's relationship with an annoying though loving brother and closes on an overwhelming scene of lovemaking on a mountain ledge.
Filip's monastic retreat hasn't helped him decide whether God wants him to serve Him directly, as a priest, or indirectly, as a medical doctor. Deeply religious, Filip feels he must resolve this matter, which means putting his relationship with Hanka at least on hold. If he chooses a life of devotion, of course, Hanka will be permanently dropped from the queue of his concerns, along with other people. Frustrated, Filip becomes a solitary wanderer up a mountain, a haunt to which his brother has introduced him. It is his brother who retrieves Filip, whose end might otherwise have come about. Filip decides that "plain ordinary living is the most important thing." His crisis of confusion and ambivalence resolved, he must again win over Hanka, who feels she has already waited too long for him.
Darkness often bathes the characters, but we find them by their light and ours. Zanussi explores how we differently balance spiritual, practical and other claims on us, showing again, in a different context, the sparkling friendship between old Tomasz and young Filip, the atheist and the believer.

(reviews courtesy of grunes)