Lunacy

Functioning mainly as a mixture of three demented masters of art (these "heroes" of mine being Edgar Allan Poe, the Marquis de Sade, and Jan Svankmajer), "Lunacy" portrays a world of hopeless depravity. Demented desires are shown to be hidden within those one both extremes of the social spectrum. "Lunacy" is a film that lives up to its title, showcasing a world of idiocy, chaos, and oppression.

In his brilliant introduction, Svankmajer claims that this is a film inspired by the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade. Being a fan of both authors, this only further fueled my fascination with the film. Poe's tortured soul often dominates the more melancholic and moody sections of such a masterwork, as well as largely inspiring the overall story. de Sade's sick spirit shines even brighter as Svankmajer displays the perverted sexual acts and desires performed by a common libertine. His surreal lens not flinching one bit, blasphemous rituals of twisted eroticism are performed in a way both chilling and occasionally amusing. Further mirroring de Sade's unconventional brilliance are the nihilistic philosophical musings of the film's own marquis, a man who refuses to hide his perverted desires, hatred for Mother Nature, and disdain for religion.

While juggling the atmospheres of ever impending doom and inescapable tragedy, "Lunacy" also manages to be one of the funniest movies of the century so far. Without fail, Svankmajer slyly mocks society using both grotesque horror and riotous black humor. Gags fill up Svankmajer's cinematic canvas like his character of the marquis' sperm does the inside of his sexual victims. Here, hilarity comes in many (often absolutely absurdist) forms, from slapstick to social commentary. Densely layered, Svankmajer's film crowds itself with much comic insanity by the second half. Many sequences work as both scenes of sadistic horror and gross out humor, so never be afraid to burst with laughter despite the urge to spray puke all over the movie screen like a hose.

This film is about the sadistic adventures of Marquis de Sade, and also the lunacy of two extreme ways of running a psychiatric asylum.

I have seen Jan Svankmajer's films before, so I knew that this film would be bizarre and disturbing. Still, this film gravely shocked me. From the moving tongues to enucleation, this film was full of revolting and gory scenes. I almost felt sick during the film. I was also surprised to see a blasphemous scene involving a statue of crucifixion, which was shocking especially considering that the Czech Republic is a religious country.

Fortunately, the story was gripping and engaging. It really kept me longing for more to unfold. Marquis' monologue questioning the existence of God was well composed, and gave new arguments (for me anyway) to the never ending debate of His existence. This film is not for the uptight or the light hearted.

A lot of viewers seem to praise Svankmajer for the lunacy of his visual imagination, for the grotesque insides he's willing to lay out. I admit there is stuff worth taking from him, notions I would be interested to engage. But a lot of what he does is so blunt that I mostly want to take a step back, he can be embarrassing to watch, for example here the petulant tirade against god; what kind of god creates only in order to destroy, why doesn't he spare us the pain? Well, precisely the god, meant broadly, the universe that creates again. How selfish, how religiously salvational, exactly the thing he rants against, to think it was all going to last forever!

He favors stark allegories, and this is one of the least subtle he has delivered: distinctions between tyranny and freedom as the ways to govern the world madhouse. We see one, then the other, always with an eye on the world at large, or so it goes.

There is one interesting bit in all this, a clever staging; a tableaux vivant that recreates Delacroix's 'Liberty', where inmates who are ostensibly free to be as creatively mad as they want are marshaled into position as living props. During the stageshow later, one of them actually attacks in a fit of lust the woman portraying liberty. Of course unbound freedom can spawn its own despots, we're meant to take this lesson ambiguously.

It's all wrapped in Poe; 'Premature Burial' as backstory attached to de Sade, a pendulum shot, the main thrust is from 'Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether'. And there is an experimental short woven through the film, typical Svankmajer stuff that he does best about animated slabs of meat trying to enter the narrative, or substituting for insights that can't be articulated there.

But it's never quite as erudite as it would like to be. The final image is unremittingly blunt; modern man as another slab of meat in a long row, a prepackaged exhibit suffocating in his modern cellophane wrap.

I suggest you watch instead The Hourglass Sanatorium, another Eastern European film about a damaged man mingling with madness in an effort to restore in him parts missing - the quest in both is for subconscious images of a parent. But that film unswathed in a dozen different layers, offering on the whole the purely symbolic construct of a graven image, but as a space of metaphysical contemplation on the placement of the soul in the cosmic grind. Here, it's one allegory broken out in so many authoritarian asides.

"Lunacy" is Jan Svankmajer's homage to Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis De Sade, (it's full of allusions to "Marat/Sade"), and as he tells us himself, is a horror film and not a work of art. It is certainly the first and I would argue it is also a work of art of quite a high order. It combines live-action with Svankmajer's trade-mark animation in giving us a study of what we might call 'the banality of evil' unlike almost anything else in cinema. It is a film that moves from a barely recognizable present to some kind of past as easily as it does from live-action to animation existing in a kind of no-man's-land between the real and surreal in a manner almost guaranteed to give you the very literal creeps; this is the real thing. Yet there is also something tongue-in-cheek about the horrors Svankmajer inflicts on us. There is a giddy perversity to the picture that to a degree dissipates the director's attack on the institutions he appears to condemn. This is as much a very bizarre celebration of hedonism as it is an attack on the communist regime. There's also an asylum in the film that makes the one at Charenton look like a Wendy House. Perverse, yes but also utterly extraordinary and undoubtedly one of Svankmajer's masterpieces.

I recently saw this film at the Jeonju film festival in Korea. It was by far the best film I saw all weekend. Selini is like a combination of Godard, Herzog and classic Czech animation- the kind of committed and convincing political film making that is increasingly rare these days. In his introduction Svankmajer compares the excesses of extreme reactionary and liberal regimes and argues that we currentlycombine the worst of both worlds in encouraging people to do whatever they want whilst relying on punishment and fear to keep them under control. The plot (based on an Edgar Allen Poe short story) is simple- an innocent traveller bears witness to the lunatics taking over the asylum. But the nightmarish atmosphere of confusion and fear, enhanced by gruesome stop motion animation between scenes, is both compelling, disturbing and extremely effective in communicating the directors ideas. The acting is committed and convincing and the story has, like the decline into madness, a chilling inevitability about it. The film uses this simple story to explore more challenging philosophical concepts. You don't have to be a fan of art-house cinema to understand and enjoy this exciting movie. 9/10