"Every morning I'm afraid to open my eyes. I have absolutely no idea what to do with the oncoming day." Adas Miaucznyski is sick and tired of his life. He lives alone in his apartment and wants to write poetry, but is constantly interrupted by the noise outside, either from construction workers or his neighbor playing Chopin too loud. He works as a poetry teacher in a high school, but his lecture is interrupted by someone making a farting sound. His salary is too low, his mother does not listen to him and only talks about her soup, his teenage son is confused, his ex-wife hates him. Adas boards a train to the beach and lies there to rest. A dog, seagulls and punks disrupt him, so he dreams of his first love, Ela. In the evening, he returns to his apartment and goes back to bed.
Voted in a 2 0 2 5 local national poll as one of the 13 best films of Polish cinema up to that point, the 6th film featuring the director Marek Koterski's fictional character of Adaś Miauczyński, "Day of the Wacko" is also considered the cinematic highlight of this grumpy persona on the screen, a black comedy that seems like a blend of Melvin Udall from "As Good as It Gets", Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver" and James Joyce's novel "Ulysses", featuring 24 hours in the life of the magnificently misanthropic, obsessive-compulsive disordered, cynical and all-around miserable anti-hero. Despite a simple story that only features Adas complaining 90% of the time, "Day of the Wacko" is able to be engaging, interesting and quirky throughout, thanks to little details, creative ideas, the director's interventions, and especially the sharp dialogues which offer mercilessly honest observations about life. Adas is both a hilarious and a tragic figure—he represents people living on the margins, ignored or shunned by others, and the only thing he can do is rebel verbally. Several scenes illustrate his state: he tries to teach teenagers poetry in high school, but only one girl truly looks at him and listens—until, in a twist, it is revealed she was just wondering why he is wearing a medical bandage on his forehead. He looks at his mail and thinks: "Is there anyone lower than me on this God-forsaken planet?"
In one scene, he is arguing from his window with a woman and her dog outside: "The dog is shitting right beneath my window!" - "It's only a dog." - "So what? Does a dog shit less shitty shit than a person?!" Since the woman does not pay attention to his complaints, he later goes to her residential building and defecates in the bushes right next to her window: "The freedom of one cannot infringe the freedom of other!" Adas has strange OCD behaviors: he fills his coffee cup full, carries it on a plate to his couch, and then pours the spilt coffee from said plate back into the cup. He also has a weird move where he "adjusts" his lower pants to sit comfortably. When he goes to a train compartment, numerous strange people go to sit next to him, as he wonders: "Maybe I attract the crazies". The height of satire is reached in two fictional scenes: one near the beginning of the film (a nationalist holding a speech on TV with a flag of Poland drawn on his forehead), the other near the end (the cult moment of a real "Polish prayer" where dozens of people pray on the balconies of a building: "Father, Son, and Holy Mary! Let me see my neighbor buried! He is not a friend of mine... May his roof come caving in! May his wife love other men! May his shop go up in flames!..."). But behind all these cruel comments, Adas hides a vulnerable side, best expressed in his long monologue some 63 minutes into the film: "Life didn't work out for me. I wasted it... And the thought that my son will end up as unhappy as I am breaks my heart!" "Life of the Wacko" is a bitter protest against injustice in life in general, where there will always be some sort of "lower class" whose lives are worse than the others. Is there a way out? Is there a possible world where everyone is happy? Can there be an ideal life impossible to waste? That the film poses such universal questions about modern society is already impressive enough.
Grade:+++
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