Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)


2010 psychoanalyticka komedie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A bearded gentlemen meets a beautiful woman in a dream and tries to discover a way to dream more so that he can be with her.

I've waited and waited for this to be available for me to watch and finally gave up and watched it on Youtube. Worth the wait? Absolutely! New Svankmajer should 1) be more of a regular thing and 2) should be celebrated as a holiday. This one seems very cheaply done. There's stop-motion, a lot more than in the last feature film, and a lot of the animation is cut-out stuff similar to the hilarious soccer short called "Manly Games" in this collection. This is very funny, too, and although I reckon the imagery and surrealistic asides would befuddle a lot of people, I couldn't keep the smile off my face while watching this. Half of this takes place in the main character's subconscious, the perfect setting for a surrealist like Svankmajer, but the conscious world isn't without the surreal touches. The main character spends a lot of his waking hours being psychoanalyzed, again perfect fodder for Svankmajer. The inside of the noggin is, after all, where all of his movies take place, isn't it? The odd visuals--chicken-headed folk, animated meat, a gigantic tongue, rolling apples, eggs, bananas, extracted teeth, antlered men, faucet-headed people, watermelons, flowers sprouting from women's heads--are easier to digest in this, like Svankmajer is picking and choosing from The Rudimentary Guide to Interpreting Dream Symbols or something. The psychological issue at the heart of the whole thing's been used enough to become a cinematic cliché, but none of that makes this any less fun. If you like your avant-garde animated movies on the playful side, this is definitely for you.

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