gruesome beauty
by Douglas Messerli
Wiktor Grodecki and David Svec (screenplay),
Wiktor Grodecki (director) Mandragora / 1997
Because of its biological combination of
active tropane alkaloids, the mandrake plant (or Mandragora) has a root and
leaves that produces anticholinergic, hallucinogenic, and hypnotic effects and
is often poisonous. Because of its hallucinogenic and narcotic effects, it was
used in ancient times as a surgical anesthetic, and believed to cure sterility
and enhance the effects of lovemaking, gradually coming to be described,
especially in Hebrew, as a “love plant.” Jacob’s infertile second wife Rachel,
barters with Leah for her son’s mandrakes, eventually becoming pregnant. In
medieval times and even today, the mandrake is associated with witchcraft.
The
magical love root which is also a potent drug that is dangerous even to the
touch—all has significance in the third installment of Polish-born director
Wiktor Grodecki’s study of the Czech boy prostitution scene. But in this case,
instead of interviewing dozens of male hustlers, the director focuses in on two
figures, one who appeared in Body without Soul, David Svec, known only
as David in both works, who already in the second of the trilogy seems older
and more knowledgeable than his peers, and who now is 16 going on 17, having
been in the business, we discover later in the film, since was a child in the
Podolí swimming pools—from the evidence of the pictures, of age 9 or 10. Being
in the business as long as he has he has not only lost his boyish looks, but
his charm. None of Germans and other foreigners want someone beyond his prime.
By
the time he meets Marek (Mirsolav Caslavka), based on David’s real boyfriend,
he has become a cynical insider who still, however, feels for the clueless kid
who, having just run away from home, has already been “hooked” like a rabbit by
the monstrous pimp who scours the railroad station daily for new boys, Honza
(Pavel Skirpal), who connects him—after the boy has been
beaten up and robbed by other young railroad
station prostitutes—drugs him so that a disgusting older customer can fuck the
virgin, Marek waking up from the pain.
By
the next evening Honza has introduced him to one of the clubs where Marek is
again beaten by older boys who resent the presence of a cute new competitor,
afterwards meeting up with David who quite literally takes control of him,
introducing him to clients and pimps, while turning Honza into the police who
arrest him due to his long record of past convictions and David’s testimony of
what he did to Marek—although when the boys are asked to come down to the station
to give evidence they understandably go on the run.
In
the meantime, David makes certain that through Marek’s 15-year-old looks and
the robberies they together pull off, convincing him that the two can survive
in a relationship between the two that evolves, although unsaid, is something
close to their being lovers.
They bring in enough money eventually to begin to imagine how they might
invest their “savings,” Marek arguing for a restaurant at the Czech-German
border, but David, always the anti-romantic insisting that it has to be a
border whorehouse. But we perceive already that there will soon be no savings.
Marek soon realizes, moreover, that his friend cannot completely be
trusted when he takes him to a sleazy game room where several pimps and their
“gangs” (color-coded by outfit) hang out. Most of the “gangs” of young boys
work the streets or the train stations, but Krysa (Kostas Zerdolaglu) uses his
boys in porn films, missing, however, the one essential link he needs to make
it big, a “striker,” a beautiful bottom willing to be fucked. His boys, David
reports, wear red. Whereas, the more successful Sasha, is in charge of several
groups of boys in yellow.
David, having taken over all their money, invests in his group of boys
with Sasha (Karel Polisenský), paying him a substantial amount to become a
“partner,” meaning he and Marek will also head up a group of boys. One of his
first proofs of commitment, however, requires that Marek hook up with a
well-known Czech art connoisseur, who for much of the evening places the boy on
a small turning pedestal, handing him a sword in order to appear like a bronze
sculpture. Simply watching him as a kind of art object results in a free-handed
ejaculation in his dressing gown. But the moment he recovers, he begins to
critique what he previously admired about the boy, insisting his balls are too
large for Donatello’s David and demanding that something must be done about
them.
Marek attempts to escape, but another man grabs him and takes him into
the next room where we can here the boy screaming. It appears that in a kind
sadistic act, either he ties knots around the boy’s balls, sticks it with pins,
or in some other painful way forces him to suffer. We never know quite what
goes on in that room, but when Marek is finally returned to the street he is
horrified to know that David knew of his client’s past tortures of boys and
nonetheless sent him there. The two briefly take up knives to fight one
another, but Marek turns the knife on himself, foretelling his own end. Indeed,
from this moment on we recognize that everything that will transpire from here
on represents a vortex into hell, as the two spin around each other as doomed
boy dreamers in love.
One
might imagine that as the man insisted the beauty would become that
night, that Marek suddenly is “awakened.” But still he trusts David, as their
bevy of boys do not at all pay for the room, let alone bring them in thousands
of crowns as they hoped. The two want out of the deal, but Sasha will not
refund their money, offering only to send them out with to a wealthy American
customer, a former Czech, Rudy (Pavel Kocí) for no cash except for what they
might rob from him.
Set up in the Praha hotel, the man
challenges them to a kind of strip-tease game of pool, where they must take off
a piece of clothing for each time he is successful it putting a ball in the
pocket, demanding that they play the game also with drinks after each
successful pocketing. Finally, they succeed in getting him so drunk that he
collapses, the boys scooping up every object of value they can find, David
finally discovering the man’s hidden wad of money in the base of small model of
the Statue of Liberty.
This time they are forced to leave town, David taking Marek back to his
hometown where he declares the air is fresher. In fact, the ugly, small
industrial village where he grew up stinks of bad air, and looks as grim as any
place might be. David has brought a bag of gifts for his family, planning to
surprise his father on his birthday. He asks Marek to join him, but his friend,
tired of family he insists, waits by the car as David walks up the several
stairs of a delipidated Communist-built apartment complex where he hangs the
package on the doorknob, unable to even to knock at the door.
We
see him quickly sprinting back down the stairs, the young boy he must have been
when he first left the building.
The boys are soon drunk, David completely
breaking down over the fact that he hadn’t even the courage to see his father.
And suddenly, we recall that he too is still a teenager of only 16, despite his
pretense of control over his totally out-of-control life. At a local bar, he
attempts to hook up with his old girlfriend, who rejects him, as several men in
the bar, tired of seeing young Prague hustlers return to wave their money in
their faces, determine to beat and possibly castrate the boys.
His
girlfriend attempts to interrupt their intentions, but when they make it clear
to her that he is a male hustler, she backs off, the men beating both boys
severely. Time and again David and Marek are beaten by gangs. Even if they
might fight back against one or two, they turn only to find others approaching
from different directions. One might describe these boys as being gang “raped”
again and again by forces of all those in the society who join to destroy them,
which, we soon recognize, is nearly everyone outside of a few friends who will
themselves turn against them if they are provoked.
They return to Prague completely broke and broken, unable to function
any more as boy prostitutes, now being wanted for their heist. They have no
choice but to join up with Krysa in the porn world, Marek gaining favor only by
permitting himself to be become Krysa’s missing striker, shocking even David by
his willingness to be fucked.
Both,
however, are terribly uncomfortable in the household where Krysa’s wife and
baby boy h ang out in the kitchen offering the duo dinner while in the next
open room Krysa prepares for the final series of boy ejaculations. They attempt
to leave, but are once more met with others who stand in their way, the boy
Libor (Miroslav Breu) who they long ago rejected for his effeminate and
drug-addict addiction and a group of others. David finally does escape, but
Marek is forced to go through with the shoot, despite the fact that Krysa mocks
him when he demands a condom to protect himself. The Germans, the porn director
insists, will not permit condoms in their films.
Without any other recompense, David is now
hooked up with foreigner for sex, but almost immediately he recognizes the
room: “I’ve been here before.” It is the same room where the boys played pool
with and robbed Rudy and, yet again, before he can run he’s met with a team of
Rudy’s men, as the disgusting new American now determines to punish him by
jamming a pool cue up his ass and allowing his confederates to savagely beat
him.
In the midst of this, Marek suddenly discovers where David is and, as if
he might be able to stop events, speeds via taxi to Praha Hotel, only to be
turned away at the door, helplessly watching his now bloodied friend be led
down by the police and taken away to prison for his previous robbery. Marek
himself is now in danger, having been spotted, for his role in the affair.
Finally, realizing his inability to alter anything and the fact that,
despite Libor and other’s enjoinder that he return for another shoot, having
become famous in Germany for his last film as a bottom, he begs him for cocaine
instead. Marek has previously always refused drugs, but now, having reached
bottom, snorts enough almost to knock him out, returning to his room only to
have a dream that the absent David has returned, his body covered with the
sores of AIDS. And soon after, he is told that indeed David was found in the
police hospital to be infected with the disease.
Meanwhile, Marek’s father (Jiri Pachman) has arrived in the city, almost
in a stupor as he tries the various spots where he son might be—and has
been—without displaying any of the conversational talents to be able to simply
ask about his son’s whereabouts. When he finally attempts to, his inquiry only
makes Sasha and others believe he is asking for a boy, and they offer him up
another Marek, a boy named Mark. Furious, he begins a brawl, and later shows up
at a game room, where a boy that seems to be of 12 or 13 asks him if he wants
to have sex with him in the toilet.
As
if stunned, it appears that he is ready to join the boy, as he asks him his
different rates for a blow job or anal intercourse, but finally only pays him
and leaves, the child prostitute proclaiming that “There are a lot of sick men
out there.”
Meanwhile, perhaps on tip from Marek, the police raid one of Krysa’s
shooting sessions where he, in what seems to be an S&M-like film, he is
torturing a boy for stealing from him. When the police have left Marek breaks
into a utility box outside of Krysa’s apartment which contains a block of
heroin in a plastic bag.
As
his father prepares to leave Prague from the train station empty-handed, Marek
takes over a bathroom stall, heating up the heroin as he prepares to shoot up,
slashing his legs over and over again with a knife while is father, using the
bathroom just before his departure stands unknowingly just a few feet away from
his now almost dead son. As the father’s train pulls out, another train
arrives, from which a young teenage newcomer exits, looking about the place
with wondrous eyes, as he moves to the main waiting room where surely he will
face....we now sadly know the story.
Grodecki’s work, far more tragically moving and brilliantly shot than
his documentaries is a painful work to watch. Yet there is something stunningly
beautiful about it as well, a kind of gruesome beauty that you might not have
imagined him capable of in the other two darkly-lit series of interviews and
scenes of the boys in action. In Mandragora he achieves an intensity
that brings his message of the hopeless condition of these ill-fated boys into
focus in a way that their own words could not.
Yet
we recall one boy in Body without Soul declaring he had not seen his
close friend David for about a year. And it is clear, despite my ending
quotation on that film by a commentator who despaired at hearing nothing about
any of these young prostitutes’ survival, that the two stars of this work
indeed, at least temporarily at, become actors in portraying their own stories.
One
person leaving a reply to the poster of this film on YouTube insists that
David is now working at the Barrandov Film School in the Czech Republic, and
that family members are still looking for him. She claims that he is married
and has a child named Brett, now 18 or 19 years of age. But obviously this is
no better that rumor or gossip. And the events he suffered have surely had an
immeasurable impact upon his life even if today if he still survives, 26 years
after his first appearance in Grodecki’s films.
Los Angeles, November 6, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2021).
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