If the plot of Polish writer and director Patryk Vega’s latest film Botoks is, as the opening credits suggest, “based on actual events”, then a word of warning: do not, under any circumstances, I repeat, any circumstances, consent to medical treatment in his native country. Particularly if you are up the duff or down on your luck in the urological or gynaecological departments.

Conditions which must run rife in the Mokotov region of Warsaw, judging by the number of patients who attend accident and emergency after inserting a cornucopia of household objects up their nether regions such as a mobile phone, a rectangular bottle of perfume and, in the case of one elderly woman, seven tangerines. “Why?” asks a doctor to her citrus-loving patient? “A perverted feeling came over me.”

If there is a colour darker than black, then that is the humour of Vega’s no-holds-barred screenplay. The pace is as rapid-fire as the one-liners which, in turn, are as graphic as the visuals. And the deadpan tone, delightful and macabre, is firmly established in the opening scenes during which two siblings are hastily informed by their sozzled father that their equally sozzled mother has drained her cup dry. “Sonny,” he says drolly, “mum’s kicked the fucking bucket.”

The plot is hung upon the world-weary shoulders of four female medics whose separate lives are gradually intertwined into a tight knot of greed, corruption and malpractice as they try to square the circle of their chronic feelings of emptiness  by joining the growing legions of upper management in earning a quick buck by taking and then breaking the Hippocratic Oath.

“Increases fertility by 68%” is an advertising slogan which sounds too good to be true. That’s because it is. The drug in question being nothing more than sugar and the stat – one short of the you-touch-mine-and-I’ll-touch-yours 69 – is equally fabricated. As is a “newly discovered” illness, randomly ascribed a pair of letters and numbers to make it sound more scientific, which a pharmaceutical company says it has found a cure for.

If you were to think of the Polish medical system as a patient upon whom you had to make a prognosis based on Vega’s clinical notes, then, to paraphrase a famous line in Hamlet, there is only one conclusion you can come to: something is rotten in the state of Poland. The same, however, cannot be said about the film which, despite having minimal publicity and few reviews, came in at number five in the UK box office chart. How must Vega be feeling? To quote one of his female protagonists: “Like a gang of niggers with horse cocks just fucked me.”

Provocative humour aside (another example being a transgender medic who hates “fucking queers”), the serious issue of abortion is put under the microscope and examined in graphic detail – hence the 18 certificate. Though given that Poland is one of the few Western countries to outlaw terminations, it is understandable why Vega confronts the issue head-on and through show rather than tell invites the audience to reflect upon which side of the fence they stand.

Director: Patryk Vega
Writer: Patryk Vega
Stars: Olga Boladz, Marcin Borkowski, Janusz Chabior
Peter Callaghan
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