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LUNACY
Directed & Written by: Jan Svankmajer.
Director of Photography: Juraj Galvánek.
Edited by: Marie Zemanovà.
Released by: Zeitgeist Films.
Language: Czech with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Czech Republic/Slovakia. 118 min. Not Rated.
With: Pavel Liska, Jan Tríska & Anna Geislerová.

Surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer’s continues to enthrall, mystify, and utterly creep us out with his latest – an ideological and philosophical film which lightly fuses Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” with the sexual and violent elements of the notorious Marquis de Sade. As the filmmaker himself states in his introduction to the film, Lunacy is essentially a political exploration of an insane asylum. “Basically, there are two ways of managing such an institution,” Svankmajer explains. “One encourages absolute freedom. The other, the old fashioned, is the well tried method of control and punishment.”

Svankmajer deftly creates a horrifying universe in which the darkest elements of the imagination come to life. Set in 19th century France, the Marquis (Jan Tríska), who continually plays with our sympathies, at once appears to be a generous man who helps the insane Jean (Pavel Liska) financially, but also a loathsome and blasphemous monster, who rapes women, organizes orgies, and spits on a statue of Christ while hammering nails into it. In fact, we are constantly made to question all the characters, and in the end, everyone seems to be mad.

Svankmajer also jerks us in and out of the film with incessant jump cuts to live pieces of meat (or inner body organs – it is unclear) dancing around, crawling into cow skulls, into drawers, shooting rifles, etc. In this way, Lunacy is particularly reminiscent of Svankmajer’s earlier works (think Alice, with its subverted melding of live action with an animated stop motion world, but with a greater emphasis on repetition). In Lunacy, however, we no longer follow around a toy rabbit in an imaginatively haunting version of Alice in Wonderland, but rather, watch raw meat slink about. True, it’s quite disturbing and shocking at first, especially when the intestines suddenly slip out of a hanging dead chicken, but the stop motion animation gets old after the 10th or 11th scene. Also, the absurd carnival-esque music which characterizes these peculiar sequences becomes annoying after awhile, and it would probably have been more effective to jump to the stop motion scenes less frequently.

Also, the film tends to get a little preachy at times, most notably when the Marquis delivers a 10-minute long soliloquy about the absence of God and the hypocrisy of Jesus. The viewer can assume the Marquis feels this way without the overbearing and melodramatic recitation. A similar scene happens at the insane asylum, where the Marquis lectures the patients about the ruthlessness of nature and man’s lack of obligation to abide by her rules. Here, however, the scene works better because the Marquis is speaking to an entire audience, rather than the singular Jean, during which viewers get the eerie sense the Marquis is essentially speaking to them.

What is great about the overt nature of Svankmajer’s messages, though, is precisely that. They’re apparent, and so we don’t feel like we’re completely missing out on some grand, cryptic universal truth. The filmmaker gets his voice across loud and clear. Whether or not Lunacy is worth watching because of its themes is a different story. Svankmajer’s filmic imagination is genius. And for that reason alone, Lunacy is worth a view. (Warning: not for the faint of heart.) Parisa Vaziri
August 8, 2006