Insatiability

After at least half a dozen futile attempts over the past two years or so, I finally managed to achieve the seemingly impossible by completely finishing watching the decidedly depraved, degenerate, and disgusting Polish dystopian flick Nienasycenie (2003) aka Insatiability directed by Wiktor Grodecki. Indeed, with its largely incoherent and convoluted storyline, incessant spastic Polish verbal vomit, visual feast of fiercely foul (anti)sexual fetishes, completely kitschy yet simultaneously kaleidoscopic aesthetics, various lead actors playing multiple important characters, and rather retarded dark scat-romp tone, Grodecki’s film is like the cinematic equivalent of receiving a root canal with the aid of acid instead of Novocaine. Admittedly, what inspired me to finally finish the film is the fact that it is based on the prophetic 1930 novel of the same name written by Polish artistic Renaissance man Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (aka ‘Witkacy’), whose writings have been adapted into various highly worthwhile and idiosyncratic films. A decadent dandy who committed suicide in a manner not unlike one of his fictional characters on September 18, 1939 the day after the Soviet invasion by taking a fatal cocktail of drugs and slitting his wrists, Witkacy had a culturally pessimistic worldview of the quasi-Spenglerian sort that foretold the death of the Occident and this is even fairly apparent in Insatiability, even if Grodecki mostly used the film as a platform to express his own unhinged homophilia. Before daring to direct his uniquely uneven Witkacy adaptation, Grodecki directed ‘serious’ films on teenage male prick-peddler from Prague like the gritty docs Not Angels But Angels (1994) and Body Without Soul (1996), as well as the curiously eroticized and sleazily stylized feature Mandragora (1997), so the apocalyptic absurdism of Insatiability seemed like a dubious subject for the auteur to tackle, hence his grating over emphasis on the more perverted yet ultimately less important elements of the novel. Undoubtedly Grodecki’s film is notable for at least one reason in that it is a post-communist adaptation of a 1930 dystopian novel that somewhat accurately prophesized the butchering and cultural retarding of Poland and it’s populous via anti-Occidental bolshevism. Of course, as one can expect from a filmmaker who has dedicated her career to fetishizing swarthy underage hustler twinks with highly deleterious STDs, Insatiability wallows in a sort of innately and hypocritically morally bankrupt Reichian anti-fascism that ultimately depicts Polish nationalists as more sexually depraved and debauched than decadent aristocrats and genocidal commie chinks, thus making it a work that Witkacy would have indubitably disapproved of. A one-note wonder of wayward wantonness that skips over major themes and subplots of the classic source novel (e.g. the mind-controlling drug ‘DAVAMESK B 2,’ which is only briefly mentioned towards the very end of the film), Insatiability is like ‘Witkacy for Retards’ as a work that ultimately demonstrates that arthouse filmmakers can created just as bastardized and disrespectful cinematic adaptations as the most monetary-motivated and artistically autistic of Hollywood hacks. Indeed, like Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) as mutated by the witless bastard Polack progeny of John Waters and Pedro Almodóvar, Grodecki’s work is fleetingly enjoyable in its own fiercely fucked way, but is certainly not destined to become any sort of cocksucker cult classic.  Featuring a superficially handsome blond Aryan specimen as the lead that would have surely been kidnapped by the SS Lebensborn organization had he been a boy during the German occupation of Poland and can hardly be described as the doppelgänger of Witkacy, Grodecki’s film is ultimately more of the director's own masturbatory fantasy than an even remotely respectful adaptation of a classic novel.

As narrated at the beginning of the film regarding blond beast protagonist Kapen Genezyp de Vahaz aka ‘Zypcio’ aka ‘Zip’ (Michal Lewandowski), “Genezyp Kapen did not tolerate captivity of any kind.” As a doctor warned the protagonist’s father when he was just a wee lad, “People who love animals often hate their own kind. Zip must be brought up strictly or he’ll turn out a monster!” Of course, by the conclusion of Insatiability, Zip will degenerate into a murderously sadomasochistic bisexual barbarian of the absurdly automaton-like sort, but first he has to spend some quality type with decadent artists and/or aristocrats and scatological proto-fascist psychopaths. At age seven, Zip became a reluctant onanist after discovering the pleasures of mutual masturbation with his male cousin Toldzio. To clean his body and soul, Zip would wash his hands with holy water after his jerk-off sessions with his cousin. While Zip would receive a good authoritarian education due to his rather wealthy father, his schooling was abruptly cut short after his school was abolished because the Poles needed new young military officers because, “the avant-garde of the Chinese commies stood at the Urals…one step away from Moscow, drowning in counterrevolutionary bloodbaths.”  Upon arriving back home at his family mansion at the age of 18 after the closing of his school, young and naïve Zip causes his wealthy father (played by Cezary Pazura, who also plays two other ‘fatherly’ characters that will ultimately have a deep influence on the protagonist during his formative years) to suffer from a massive heart attack after telling him that he has enrolled in Western Literature at a university and has no interest in going to a technical institute and following in tradition by taking over the family brewery.  Indeed, Zip finds beer to be banal and dreams of becoming an important artist, yet his life will ultimately take a more destructive than creative route.

While his father is on his deathbed, Zip decides to have some fun at a local club where he meets a sexually predatorial aristocrat named Princess Ticonderoga Irina Vsievolodovna (Katarzyna Gniewkowska) who provides patronage to decadent avant-garde artists, including a perennially ‘misunderstood’ hunchbacked poof pedophile composer named Putrycydes Tengler (Cezary Pazura), as well as a soft and exceedingly effete poet with a sickening shit-eating grin named Sturfan Abnol (played by Arkadiusz Jakubik, who also plays one of the other main roles). After proudly stating, “unappreciated artists are my specialty” and asking the protagonist if he is an artist as if to express her interest in ‘sponsoring’ him, Princess Irina makes it quite clear that she wants to unzip Zip’s pants and steal his virginity, but sexually depraved queer composer Tengler ultimately gets to the lad first. After describing artists like himself as slaves and playthings of “the bored and corrupted members of yesterdays elite, but today’s scum, which only in our country miraculously stays afloat,” Tengler attempts to coerce Zip into not becoming an artist, even describing him as “too human” for such a debasing trade. Tengler is no less cynical about politics, stating regarding Poland’s dubious future, “For no matter who wins, our fascism or Chinese communism…not to mention the Western “democracy”…the outcome will be the same: a satisfied machine.” Zip seems to have a hard time comprehending what Tengler says to him as reflected in a rather naive yet impassioned short speech that seems inspired by Heinrich von Kleist's ‘Lebensplan’ where he remarks, “I do care about my life…one of its kind, different and unpredictable…perfect even in its imperfection! If I fail I want it to be the greatest failure ever.” In a strange way, Zip will more or less realize this professed dream, but it will come at the price of his sanity, morality, and innocence, among other things.

After being more or less raped by Tengler at gunpoint and ‘suffering’ an orgasm that causes him to howl at the moon like a wolf, Zip goes to Princess Irina’s mansion and annoys the decadent demoness when he fails to get an erection, so she sticks the boy’s head between head legs and makes him perform cunnilingus on her in a surreal scenario that demonstrates that director Grodecki has a serious fear of pussy. After the particularly perverse princess kicks him out of her bed, Zip symbolically masturbates while staring at himself in a mirror and then goes back to Irina and sexually services her in a rather bestial fashion as if he is some sort of young Polish Tarzan. The next morning, Zip wakes up completely unclad and in the company of Irina’s entire family, including her elderly cuckolded Prince husband and seemingly gay son ‘Scampi’ (Mikolaj Krawczyk), who proudly declares, “Whores and horses…that’s the Polish Tradition.” In between babbling about his nihilistic nympho mother's rather voracious sexual appetite, Scampi remarks, “The Chinese are fighting a new kind of war. They want to suck the white race out,” thus offering the first prophecy of the ‘Yellow Peril’ short of racial chaos that will soon consume Polackland. After being scared away by the Princess’ particularly perverse family and their strange Laissez-faire to sex and decadence, Zip goes home and literally laughs hysterically upon learning that not only has his father died, but also that his padre did not leave his family a single penny and instead gave it to his worker’s co-op. On top of that, Zip and his mother and sister are told that they must immediately vacate the family mansion and take refuge in the servants’ quarters. When Zip later goes to see his beloved Princess Irina, she tortures him by locking him in a transparent room and forcing him to watch her have sex with his beloved cousin Toldzio Porayski (Miroslav Caslavka). When Zip goes home later that day, he gets the double shock of not only finding his mother in bed with a boorish servant with a bloated beer gut, but also that he has been drafted into the military, thus bringing a swift end to his laidback days of bisexual hedonism before he even had the chance to even cultivate himself into some sort of preposterous posturing art fag.

Upon entering boot camp, Zip is forced to do debauched things like collectively defecating with fellow recruits while being examined by an officer. The Polish military is run by a mad megalomaniac of the hyper-stereotypically ‘fascistic’ sort named General Kocmoluchowicz (also Cezary Pazura), who enjoys firmly grasping the bare genitals of new recruits while screaming insane pseudo-Nietzschean inspirational slogans in their faces like, “Cumulate power! You’ll find the use for it sooner or later.” Upon meeting Zip, the General curiously asks him if he has ever heard “Stabat Mater” by neo-Romantic composer Karol Szymanowski (who, between 1922 and 1937, had a ‘Nationalist Period’ where he incorporated folk music into his compositions) and then states upon realizing who he is, “Your father recommended you to me. In three months you’re to report to me, you snotty brat! The worst in life is when you have to wait too long.” While Zip and Kocmoluchowicz initially clash as demonstrated by the fact that the latter has the former imprisoned for two weeks for failing to wake up one day, the two will ultimately be united in madness and bloody murder. Meanwhile, Princess Irina, who the protagonist is mad at due to her fiery fuck fest with his cousin, starts a matriarchal group called ‘The Syndicate’ that seeks to cultivate an army of handsome and strong-willed Übermenschen that is at odds with Kocmoluchowicz’s War Party. When Zip discovers that his prole-fucking mother is conspiring with the Princess to get him to become an adjunct of the Syndicate and spy on the War Party for the Chinese, he hatefully states of his progenitor, “This corpse of a dried up whore! To hell with my mother! Disgusting sperm-bag full of proletarian secretions of her lover! He can pour his body into her like into a coffin.” Indeed, Zip becomes brainwashed by the irrational collectivist thinking of the General as indicated by his remark, “What a pleasure it is to have somebody to rule over you so you can trust him more than yourself! You’re restoring my faith in a spiritual rebirth,” but that somewhat changes when both men become pathologically obsessed with a sadomasochistic femme fatale actress named Persy (Weronika Marczuk-Pazura) who actually manages to coerce Kocmoluchowicz into dressing up in a baby outfit and engaging with coprophilia, among other things.  Indeed, Persy is a dirty dame that enjoys feces-flavored French kisses and she has the power to tame any man, including raving egomaniacs like Kocmoluchowicz who stylize themselves as the next Napoleon.

While Princess Irina continues to attempt to get Zip to spy for her by stating things to him like, “If we fail, nothing will stop the Chinese, the Yellow Flood and the end of a white race,” the protagonist is quite like contemporary deracinated American and Western European whites in that he is more interested in the short-term and chasing after pussy than thinking of the long-term and saving his people from genocide. In fact, Zip is so obsessed with Persy that he finds himself incapable of actually asserting himself upon attempting to rape her and thus cries like a little girl as a result. After a disastrous street battle between the Syndicate and the War Party that leaves the protagonist in the hospital, Zip meets a young nurse with a reasonably rack that he plans to marry, but the love affair does not last long as the young soldier ends up strangling his ladylove to death during during a rather impassioned coitus session. Meanwhile, the followers of a yellow devil lover named Djevani begins brainwashing and drugging people, including Princess Irina, who describes herself as being “reborn.” As composer Tengler states regarding the phenomenon, “Djevani has been sent by Murti Bing – the same yellow monkeys who are devouring the whole of Europe! This religion has been invented to fool Great White Morons of the West and to produce a manure out of you…to fertilize yellow masses of the Far East.” When the Chinese finally takeover all of Eastern Europe and invade Poland, General Kocmoluchowicz suffers a completely incapacitating mental breakdown, so Persy has to whip him back into shape by bashing in his genitals with spiked torture devices and pouring hot wax on his body, among various other sadomasochistic methods. While the General has one of his men murdered by Zip after he attempts to convince him not to battle the unconquerable Chinese commie leader Mandarin Wang Tang Tsang (also Arkadiusz Jakubik), he later has an unexpected change of heart and cancels the battle, stating, “long live mankind!” like a true unhinged madman.

After cancelling the battle with Mandarin Wang, General Kocmoluchowicz and his followers are invited to a fancy multicultural breakfast where the Chinese leader declares regarding his masterplan, “You cannot govern yourself and you’re racially exhausted […] We are exhausted too, not as bad as you, but still…And so we must refresh our race, we must swallow and digest you…and create a new yellow-white variation! And so we are introducing compulsory mixed marriages.”  Indeed, the yellow peril wants forced white-yellow miscegenation, not realizing that many Slavs already carry Asian blood, especially of the Mongol sort.  Kocmoluchowicz goes along with all of Wang’s demands, including the sanction of his own execution via decapitation. Indeed, after Wang states to him, “As much as I respect you, I must recognize you as a dangerous individualist belonging to a bygone era…And therefore in the name of mankind we must behead you,” Kocmoluchowicz replies, “The Mother of Fuck…What’s a life not lived on the tip of a blade stuck into the unknown? At the height of madness or wisdom” and then proceeds to ‘rape the totality of being’ by violently penetrating Persy doggie style. While banging Persy, the General has his head cut off by Zip with a samurai sword at the behest of Mandarin Wang. Although Persy initially cries over the General’s decapitated head, Zip brings her solace by savaging fucking her and Wang pays tribute to the protagonist by describing him as “exemplary mad man.” In a stupid twist ending that makes the entire experience of the film seemingly patently pointless, it is revealed that most of the story was the protagonist's dream.  Indeed, after awaking from his dystopian nightmare, Zip states regarding his absurd and obscene oneiric experiences, “I won’t stand it alone. I won’t” while sporting the same goofy haircut he had before being drafted into the military.

Indubitably, next to the classic Witkacy adaptation Pożegnanie jesieni (1990) aka Farewell to Autumn directed by Mariusz Trelinski, Insatiability seems like a preposterously politically correct celluloid turd stain that was directed by a crypto-pornographer who feels all too unwarrantedly confident in his execution of cinematic humor, eccentricity, and excess. Indeed, ultimately Grodecki’s film seems like it is trying too hard to be weird for weird’s sake while simultaneously hypocritically bending over and taking in the ass from the anti-Occidental gatekeepers of cultural Marxist mania. In the Polish filmmaker’s attempt to ‘sanitize’ Witkacy and make his work palatable for postmodern pansies, Frankfurt School fanboys, and devout Freudians, Grodecki is comparable to Jewish philosopher and translator Walter Kaufmann who attempted to appropriate Friedrich Nietzsche from the Nazis for leftist and/or Jewish intellectuals after the Second World War and portray him as a sort of pathetic philo-Semitic humanist. Indeed, even the Gothic horror flick W starym dworku czyli niepodleglosc trójkatów (1984) aka In an Old Manor House or The Independence of Triangles aka In the Old Manor House, which is based on two of the Polish artist’s plays, is much more faithful to the spirit of Witkacy’s weltanschauung than Grodecki’s film. Of course, if watched as a sort of patently preposterous Polish take on the eccentric excesses of the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, Insatiability ultimately offers a much more tolerable experience that rewards the viewer in terms of sheer raunchiness and vulgarity. Like virtually all of the director’s films, Grodecki’s blatantly botched Witkacy adaptation is highly and meticulously stylized trash masquerading as socio-politically revolutionary art.  After all, how serious can one take a film featuring a protagonist that looks like Macaulay Culkin had he actually reached puberty, a military man jovially consuming feces while sporting a baby outfit, a monstrous vagina, and a morbidly cynical pedophile with a hunchback getting in a bitch-fest with a debauched diva-like princess with a rivaling fetish for virginal young blond boys, among various other forms of less than dignified debauchery. If Insatiability is considered a serious arthouse work in Poland then I can only assume remarks made by characters in the work like “Mediocre people keep Poland standing!” and “Whores and horses…that’s the Polish Tradition” are completely factually accurate.  Of course, I have no doubt in my mind that the homo hunchback character of Putrycydes Tengler was speaking for auteur Grodecki when he states, “Is there anything more horrible than the Polish gentry?! They are infesting everything these days! I prefer the Jews any day and I’d like to see Poland Jewish rather than aristocratic,” hence why the Screen Actors Guild of America awarded the director the SAG Best Indie Director Award in 2004.  Indeed, there are few things that are more pathetic than a Slavic filmmaker attempting to suck the shriveled and diseased Rebbe-circumcised cock of the Judaized West.

-Ty E