Lunacy

2005 comedic "horror"

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Jean is returning from a journey in which he has buried his mother, a woman who spent the last few years of her life in an asylum. Jean himself is haunted by nightmares of being institutionalized by bulbous bald men who grunt and approach him with a straightjacket. He befriends a marquis after destroying his room at an inn and is taken to the marquis' extravagant home. There, he eavesdrops on some kind of blasphemous orgy and is the butt of many practical jokes executed by the marquis and his tongue-less henchman. Following another nightmare, he agrees to stay at an asylum run by a friend of the marquis because he has hopes of saving a woman he believes is in trouble. Chickens abound, and Jean has to make choices about who can be trusted.

Ostensibly, this is a story Jan Svankmajer adapted from stories by De Sade and Poe. There's a lack of animation in the actual storytelling--only a shirt and a cupboard, I believe, both in dream sequences. There are stop motion animated scenes, all involving meat and/or chickens (which, I guess, are also meat) that work as interludes between scenes. Those, accompanied by this insane carnivalesque music, are brilliant as always. The live action stuff is just as brilliant, at times threatening to unravel into nonsensical surrealism but always retaining a central story line. The anachronistic scenery outside a carriage ride with the marquis, the marquis' "prayer" while he hammers nails into a plaster Christ, the "art therapy" at the sanotarium, the tarred-and-feathered doctors gathering up patients after their escape, the marquis and his friend positioning the inmates to make a tableau of Delacroix's "liberty" painting, the marquis' friend's collection of faux facial hair. . .great, memorable splashes of chaos. And of course all that animated meat. Really, can a movie with animated meat be bad? More grotesque than the director's promised horrific, and really more comical than anything else. Atmosphere + humor = the absurd = insane brilliance. Not as consistently great as Faust or Alice or, my personal favorite Conspirators of Pleasure, but great nonetheless. Long live Svankmajer!

Note: Svankmajer isn't dead yet. He has, however, announced that his next film will be his last. I did read that his son is now making movies though.

I'm made of meat: