It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Jan Svankmajer goes nuts.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

The eminence grise of Czech surrealism, stop-motion animator Jan Svankmajer is indisputably one of the greatest living filmmakers. He is also, quite literally, a man without a country, a former dissident who seems as despairing of his homeland's free-market present as he was of its totalitarian past. Lunacy, which gets a one-night stand at International House this Saturday, is at once Svankmajer's most cynical film and his most joyously profane, as if in shedding all hope for the future he has found a curious kind of liberation.

Svankmajer's early short films were barely veiled attacks on Communist repression, paranoid fables and exultant celebrations of freedom, often characterized in purely physical terms. In the brief, riotous Meat, slabs of raw beef cavort and copulate unstoppably, but in the bitterly ironic Dimensions of Dialogue, clay figures who attempt to settle their differences with words end up beating each other to a pulp. In the post-Communist era, Svankmajer has cast an increasingly jaundiced eye on the liberating power of 21st-century capitalism. While 1996's Conspirators of Pleasure was an erotic declaration of independence, 2000's Otesanek recast a Czech fable about a ravenous golem-child as a parable of insatiable materialism.

Lunacy, first shown in 2005, is even darker, a bleakly ribald farce which argues that the world is an insane asylum, and there is no escaping it. As the lights go down, the 72-year-old Svankmajer appears for an onscreen prologue, at once laying out the movie's themes and disowning any pretense to greater meaning. The film, he informs us, "is not a work of art," but an "infantile tribute" to Poe and the Marquis de Sade. Rather than art, Svankmajer proposes an ideological debate: Is the best way to run a madhouse through repression, or by letting the inmates run free?

In time, Lunacy works its way around to a bona fide asylum, where both systems are put into practice with equally disastrous results. But first comes a distended prologue, in which wild-eyed traveler Jean Berlot (Pavel Liska) meets the grotesquely outsize Marquis (Jan Triska). A nervous, rabbity sort, Jean is fresh meat for the wolfish Marquis, a lip-smacking libertine whom Triska plays with volcanic relish. Quickly pulling the spineless Jean into his orbit, the Marquis spirits him off to his villa, and apparently out of the 21st century, since after the Marquis' horse-drawn carriage crosses a highway overpass, we see no further signs of the present day.

At the Marquis' pleasure palace, Jean peeps in on an orgiastic black mass and engages his host in moral debate, although Jean's wan moralism is weak beer compared to the Marquis' gleeful blasphemy. (Liska is likewise no match for Triska's outsize performance, whose grotesquerie Svankmajer emphasizes with microscopic close-ups.) The Marquis' unhinged taunting of his priggish houseguest has the verve of late-model Bunuel, but the movie doesn't really kick into gear until the Marquis spirits helpless Jean off to a nearby asylum, where the pallid creature is promptly committed.

SICK IN THE HEAD: Pavel Liska gets food for thought.

The Marquis' asylum is literally run by the inmates, namely a comical doctor whose main concern is choosing the right fake beard for each occasion. Patients throw paint at fat women and bang their heads on standing pipes, all in the name of do-as-thou-wilt. To commemorate the inmates' takeover (the institutions' former authorities have, it emerges, been locked in the building's bowels), the Marquis stages a tableau vivant of Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People, with sans-culottes replaced by drooling simpletons, to which Svankmajer adds a wobbling, parodic chorus of "La Marseillaise." This freedom stuff, it seems, isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Of course, when Jean finally looses the asylum's tarred-and-feathered old guard from the basement prison, they're no better, clubbing and torturing like secret policemen returned to their old stomping grounds. Lunacy isn't an anti-freedom polemic so much as it is the wry pessimism of an old man who has seen the worst of human nature emerge under two opposing systems that promised to conquer it. The animation that has always been Svankmajer's stock in trade plays a reduced but critical role in Lunacy, incorporated as an interstitial parallel narrative in which hunks of meat — slabs of beef, ripped-out tongues, internal organs — take on a life of their own. The animated interludes' relation to the scenes that surround them isn't always clear, but one key piece shows a pulsating pile of flesh pressing against the bars of a birdcage, while another shows a shrink-wrapped steak in a supermarket aisle testing the bounds of its plastic prison. Lunacy is too jaded with every form of ideology to call it a political film, but one message rings out above the shriek of madmen. Meat always wins.

(sam@citypaper.net)

Lunacy

Written and directed by Jan SvankmajerA Zeitgeist releaseSat., Dec. 9, International House