After the expectations that Polish filmmaker Wiktor Grodecki created with his documentaries «Not Angels, But Angels» and «Body Without Soul», the melodrama «Mandragora» gave a lackluster conclusion to his trilogy about homosexual prostitution and pornography in Prague. In the story of Marek Nedela (Miroslav Caslavka), the fifteen-year-old boy who arrives in the Czech capital and psychically and physically degrades before turning 16, there are no traces of originality or anything that Grodecki did not show us before, in the two documentaries, with the added value of seeing and hearing the testimonies said by real characters.
Here he tells a story by the book, as he follows one by one the steps of Marek's degradation, since the day he arrives at the Prague station and is approached by a pimp (Pavel Skripal), who later sells him to a horny old man. It does not take long before we watch typical scenes: the transvestite cabaret, the rivalry between the little prostitutes, entanglements with the police, beatings, robberies, sessions with a pornographer... This time Grodecki (who wrote the script with the collaboration of David Svec, a teenager who plays Marek's only friend) introduced the figure of a father, Marek's working class father, but his presence provides little more than moments of crying, shouting and beatings.
The gimmicky and manipulative aesthetic strategy did not change at all by the third round. For «Mandragora», the director hired the services of German composer Wolfgang Hammerschmid who, at the helm of the Munich symphony orchestra, provided him with music from start to finish. Grodecki did not cast aside, of course, the classics or the little rock and roll numbers here and there. In a strict definition of melodrama, the music almost does not stop in this alarming drama. Like the two documentaries, it has very few moments of silence or exclusive use of the background noise. Like those other two works, "Mandragora" is not without interest, but revels in its own sexist moralism and sensationalism.
Here he tells a story by the book, as he follows one by one the steps of Marek's degradation, since the day he arrives at the Prague station and is approached by a pimp (Pavel Skripal), who later sells him to a horny old man. It does not take long before we watch typical scenes: the transvestite cabaret, the rivalry between the little prostitutes, entanglements with the police, beatings, robberies, sessions with a pornographer... This time Grodecki (who wrote the script with the collaboration of David Svec, a teenager who plays Marek's only friend) introduced the figure of a father, Marek's working class father, but his presence provides little more than moments of crying, shouting and beatings.
The gimmicky and manipulative aesthetic strategy did not change at all by the third round. For «Mandragora», the director hired the services of German composer Wolfgang Hammerschmid who, at the helm of the Munich symphony orchestra, provided him with music from start to finish. Grodecki did not cast aside, of course, the classics or the little rock and roll numbers here and there. In a strict definition of melodrama, the music almost does not stop in this alarming drama. Like the two documentaries, it has very few moments of silence or exclusive use of the background noise. Like those other two works, "Mandragora" is not without interest, but revels in its own sexist moralism and sensationalism.