Beyond the Multiplex

Svankmajer's "Lunacy" is one of the year's best films. Plus: A powerfully erotic movie starring Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

"Lunacy"

Aug. 10, 2006 | Last week I made some offhand comment in this space about how August was the home for all movies that were just too weird for the 11 other, more normal months of the year. Honestly, I had no idea. On a stack of satanic Bibles, I swear I had not yet seen Jan Svankmajer's bitter and grotesque political allegory "Lunacy," or the equally demented horror flick "Calvaire (The Ordeal)" by the young Belgian director Fabrice du Welz.

Both of those are potential cult films delivered with integrity and tremendous craftsmanship; "Lunacy," to my way of thinking, is one of the best films of the year. Both are defiantly and decisively not for everyone. Fans of the Gothic, the bizarre and the extreme will be delighted. If your ears perk up when I mention Alejandro Jodorowsky's "Topo," or William Peter Blatty's "Ninth Configuration," you're tuned to the right channel. But if you're not interested in spending time in a lunatic asylum infested with chickens ("Lunacy") or observing the homoerotic barroom stomp-dance rituals of rural Belgium ("Calvaire"), perhaps you'd better move on.

This extraordinary week of releases even offers other things to move on to. Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington's festival favorite, "The House of Sand," is a gorgeous landscape picture that belongs to a different tradition, the art-house spectacles of Antonioni, Kurosawa or Jane Campion. Last but not least, we have Hans Canosa's "Conversations With Other Women," a sexy and intriguing little talkfest about a one-night stand whose participants (Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart) know each other better than we at first realize.

"Lunacy": From Europe's master surrealist, a dark fable of meat, freedom and madness
If you know anything about contemporary animation, you don't need me to convince you that the 72-year-old Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer is a master of the form. His claymation and stop-motion shorts of the '70s and '80s (especially "The Castle of Otranto," "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Dimensions of Dialogue"), combining ghoulish humor, a fascination with death and decay, and flat-out zaniness, trickled out to the Western world and had a prodigious impact on other artists and filmmakers. The aesthetic that has made Tim Burton a millionaire is little more than watered-down Svankmajer.

That said, I haven't been a huge fan of Svankmajer's forays into live-action feature films. Or not until now. His 1987 version of "Alice" struck me as small-minded when compared to its source material, and his 2000 "Little Otik," an adaptation of a traditional Czech fairy tale, was arid and emotionally constricted. But "Lunacy," which blends the plots of a couple of Edgar Allan Poe stories with the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, is a satirical masterpiece, as rich, dark and sinful as the chocolate cake several characters eat during a blasphemous and memorable sex scene.

In a world where images have largely lost the power to shock anyone (except those who make it their business to be permanently shocked), Svankmajer understands that such images must accompany ideas in order to be truly outrageous. On its surface, "Lunacy" is a ribald, overcooked fable about an earnest young man named Jean Berlot (Pavel Liska), whose travels through the modern Czech countryside bring him under the spell of the mysterious Marquis (Jan Tríska), who travels by coach, wears a wig, and generally lives as if it were the 18th century, in defiance of the world of cars, motorways and prefab housing around him.

Jean's adventures with the depraved Marquis, and with the beautiful Charlotte (Anna Geislerová), a girl the Marquis has apparently perverted and enslaved, provide a funhouse-mirror reflection of recent political history, maybe not just in the Czech Republic or Eastern Europe after communism, but all over the world since the birth of the Enlightenment. It seems to be true, as Charlotte insists, that the Marquis and his psychiatrist friend Dr. Murlloppe (Jaroslav Dusek) are lunatics who have staged a rebellion in a mental hospital, overthrown the official authorities, and installed their own regime of anarchy and libertinage.

But is the Marquis' lawless institution, plagued by violence, open fornication and wandering chickens, better or worse than the brutal law-and-order reign of Dr. Coulmiere (Martin Huba), whom the inmates have tarred, feathered and imprisoned in the basement? Will Jean be a hero or a traitor if he frees the old rulers and saves Charlotte from further debauchery?

Viewers familiar with the Marquis de Sade's life and work will recognize that Svankmajer has borrowed not just elements of Sade's philosophy but also his actual biography, since much of his later life was spent in a post-revolution French loony bin. But "Lunacy" doesn't sentimentalize Sade, or try to remake him as a rakish avatar of democracy (as in Philip Kaufman's dreary "Quills").

To his immense credit, Svankmajer does not think the questions raised by the Marquis' challenge to authority have answers. He interrupts the live action with trademark animated sequences featuring hunks of raw meat breathing, breeding, copulating and generally frolicking like a horde of happy slugs. If anything, these comic-horrific images suggest that revolutionary switchbacks from "tyranny" to "freedom" and back again make little difference to human beings, whom he sees as instinct-driven meat puppets pursuing primitive gratification.

On the other hand, Svankmajer finally seems comfortable with human actors, and the interplay between Liska's doleful, dutiful Jean and Tríska's cackling, overamped Marquis lends the film an edgy, unstable warmth. Juraj Galvánek's cinematography is full of gruesome delights and ominous atmosphere; sadly, this is Svankmajer's last film to feature production design by his late wife, the surrealist painter Eva Svankmajerová.

The director himself appears at the beginning of the film, informing us soberly that we are about to see a horror film, "with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre," and not a work of art. "Today, art is all but dead anyway," he goes on. All we have left is "a kind of trailer for the reflection of the face of Narcissus." If those words warm your heart, well, you may be the same kind of cynical creep I am. And you may be ready to see this morbid, extravagant and hilarious film. It's a signature work of these terrible times.

"Lunacy" is now playing at Film Forum in New York. Opens Aug. 18 in Los Angeles; Aug. 25 in San Francisco; Sept. 8 in Boston, Denver and Sunrise, Fla.; Sept. 15 in Austin; Sept. 29 in Dallas and Houston; Oct. 13 in Santa Fe, N.M., and Seattle; Oct. 20 in Pittsburgh; and Oct. 27 in Chicago and St. Louis, with other cities to follow.

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