Les conspirateurs du plaisir

Slave/Master -- Sacher Masoch -- Sade, Marquis de -- SvankMajer. All S&M - purely by coincidence?

The liner notes and end credits of Conspirators of Pleasure list Max Ernst, Sacher Masoch, Marquis de Sade and Luis Buñuel as inspirations and or sources, planting Svankmajer's film firmly on the map of surrealist experimentation and with little doubt, denoting it as social and political commentary. Sexuality is employed to both present and represent socio-political disorders affected by the taut political tensions and trying social circumstances in everyday Eastern Europe.

Power relations between two tenants take the form of S&M, and repressed sexuality emerge in multifarious perverse ways in a city constantly spying on its citizens, where moments of privacy have to be enacted in strict interiors like closets and the imagination for fear of discovery and public shaming. Thrift stores where everyday items are salvaged turn out to be the sites providing raw materials for building and enacting sexual fantasies.

In Conspirators of Pleasure, sexual perversion and fetishes come across as symptomatic of a larger social and political neurosis. Yet, the end result of a film built on such an idea doesn't come across as staid, but superbly entertaining and wry, helped in no small part by the supremely brilliant realization by Svankmajer.

Conspirators of Pleasure is a winner and a must-watch.

In his most original (at least from what I've seen), very different from his other films, most disturbing yet most hilarious film, the great magician Jan Svankmajer, animator-surrealist from Prague, makes his modern-day city the setting for the story of six ordinary people with extraordinary fantasies. The film that acknowledges as inspirations Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel (the admitted fetishist himself) and the Marquis De Sade (all of them I am sure would love it) portrays the strange world of hidden fetishes that can be found in the most unexpected places. Three men and three women encounter one another through the day and exchange the knowing glances even though some of them don't even know each other but there is a certain connection and they feel it. They all are "conspirators of pleasure" who spend the most part of the film meticulously, painstakingly and creatively inventing methods, tools and constructions for fulfilling their bizarre fantasies. We will observe chicken suit with the wings made of umbrellas. There is a woman-post worker with a fetish for bread. She rolls up balls of bread and sucks them up her nose through a straw (honestly, not my idea of fun but hey, you should see the look at her face). There are unusual brushes made up of rolling pins, pan lids, and stolen pieces of fur that one man, the detective rubs over his body while his wife, the TV news-person feels neglected and buys some live carp that she strokes and feeds them the bread balls which were delivered by the post worker. The TV lady has no idea that she's been an object of a newsagent- guy's desire. He constructed the machine that consisted of several mechanic arms which can hug, stroke, rub, pull...gently while he watches her on TV and reaches his climax at the same time as she does helped by her carps but I am going to stop right here and only add that "some of our most exciting sexual experiences take place entirely within the minds of other people." (Roger Ebert - not about "Conspirators of Pleasure" but I thought it'd fit perfectly here)

What can I say? The film is a satire on human perversion but what makes it unique, its style. It has no dialog whatsoever but it is not needed, really. The lust and desires don't need words, they speak for themselves. There are the moments in the film when you'd look in total disbelieve at the weird characters and their bizzar objects of longing but you just cant help smiling. It's been over the year since I discovered Svankmajer and I've been trying to see anything that he's made. He's never disappointed me. He looks inside my mind, takes the the hidden desires and weird fetishes that I would never want to be uncovered and I would only admit to myself I have, turns them into the images hellishly disturbing but mesmerizing and hilarious and threw them back at me using his unmatched and brilliant (sorry, I have to use this word) combination of live action film-making, special effects, and his deservingly celebrated animations techniques.

Masterpiece of perversion, the fetish movie to end all fetishes.

Long Live Jan Svankmajer!

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and got much from it that other movies don't give. In particular, it's one of the few movies I've ever seen that I recognized as pertaining to some part of my own life. But, as the cliché runs, an hour later I was hungry again. The reason, I think, is that Svankmajer doesn't really make long films, but short films gone long. This one sustains its length through the fertility (so to speak) of invention with which it elaborates the basic idea--a half dozen fetishists obsessively engaged in creating elaborate, rather Rube Goldbergish devices to realize their *very* fey erotic fantasies--but the idea is miniature, not full-scale, and the film can only detail it rather than develop it. That doesn't mean that what appears on the screen isn't always interesting: it's visually original, often quite funny (the profusion of ordinary objects that the filmmaker is able to make look like genitalia is sometimes startling; some of their hidden potentials I would never have suspected), and, if not making a particular social or political point (the filmmaker seems equivocal about the morality or utility of this behavior), indicates points the viewer can make for himself. But for me there simply wasn't enough conspiracy or enough pleasure; only about enough for a short film. The idea of a conspiracy of pleasure is brilliant, I think, and had me viewing society in a new way (for a few hours at least), but here it only goes as far as the characters' connecting in various odd, often antilogical ways. I would have liked to see more of a conspiracy, either actual or metaphorical, and not just random connections. I would have liked to see more pleasure, too. The concentration, isolation, desperation, fear, and excitement of pursuing the erotic muse are all precisely conveyed, but not the ecstasy they're in aid of. Still,... (recycle to beginning of paragraph)

Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer is known for his bizarre stop motion films. In his full length films like "Alice" and "Faust", he takes his viewers to a subconscious world with real actors and stop motion creatures. "Conspirators of Pleasure" deals with the fantasies and fetishes of various everyday people. Each person at first seeming normal, spends almost the whole film trying to invent methods of fulfilling their bizarre fantasies. There is even some moments when characters become puppets. One man designs a head of a chicken suit and fantasizes about dropping a rock on his neighbor's head. The neighbor lady fantasizes about dominating her neighbor, turning him into a puppet and whipping him. Another example is a woman's fetish for bread. She rolls up balls of bread and sucks them up her nose through a straw. Of course there's a whole assortment of other depraved people with strange fantasies. Although the film is extremely bizarre, it is also very funny. Jan Svankmajer has created an intense atmosphere of strange desire, that may not be far from how some everyday people function. It's a funny film that explores the strange world of hidden fetishes.

8/10

This is my favorite full-length Svankmajer film, and not just because the lack of dialogue leaves no room for poor casting decisions in the dub for the American release (see Alice).

Besides the fact that fetish films are better or worse depending on the level of weirdness in the fetishes portrayed, this subject compliments Svankmajer's style perfectly.

The Kino DVD release comes with a bonus short film, Food, which illustrates what I'm talking about perfectly. Food is typical Svankmajer in how meticulously the temporal details are. If we see one man eating a full breakfast out of another man's vending-organs, the next man in line's breakfast has to be given the same time and detailed effort in portraying.

Likewise, Conspirators of Pleasure leaves nothing to the imagination but the story. But that's what fetishes are all about. Perverse in their contortion of sexual mores but perverse also in their slavery to the mundane details and meticulous planning.

This is a very worthwhile study in perversity that doubles as pretty straightforward and blunt surrealism.