Ironic then (or maybe as a good old told-with-a-straight-faced joke) that Svankmajer makes an intro before the film about how "this is not art, art is probably dead anyway" when his film is just that: whacked out film-art to the tune of classic horror, as the genre goes, and as classic satire. So much of this is rich and densely packed material that it kind of goes by simply. Murloppe run rough-shod as the real doctors are locked in the basement, tarred and feathered with a bunch of chickens. Once there, it's a total upside-down cake where the lunatics have taken over, so to speak and literally, as the Marquis and Dr. One thing leads to another- including a presumed suffocation by banana- and the Marquis oddly convinces Jean to come to the sanitarium to get some voluntary 'assistance'. Jean (Pavel Liska) is on his way back from his mother's funeral and is "befriended" (very loose quotes) by a Marquis (perfectly cast Jan Triska, definitely one of the creepiest of all screen villains) who by horse and buggy in present day takes him to his castle where Jean witnesses "blasphemous" acts at night with the Marquis and a bunch of naked ladies in a barn with an over-nailed cross. maybe, comparatively, he is saner, but the question still stands amid a matter of degree towards the end we're faced with the question of sanity in the face of "corporal punishment." Maybe the point is akin to the old George Carlin line about life being a freak-show and being born is just getting a ticket for the ride. Is he, perhaps, any less wacko than the Marquis, or his fellow Doctor with the fake beards? Well. But aside from the direction being stronger, and Svankmajer's actors being better than usual, it's such a thematically rich film that only a surrealist could pull off: one might say 'what does this mean or what's the symbol of the body doing that or that piece of food or the tar and feather or 13 punishments?' Secretly, Svankmajer's response, probably akin to Bunuel, would be 'does it ultimately matter?' In the scope of Lunacy, a film based on works by Poe and Marquis de Sade (what parts are which will only be known to those who've read the specific Poe stories, or are familiar enough with Sade, though I can likely guess the latter's influence in the last fifteen minutes), it's about the simple question: who's sane or not, and what defines sanity? Our protagonist, whom we think is the sanest of all, has recurring nightmares of men coming into his room at night with a straight-jacket ready to take him away and then his super-violent reaction. Thankfull, this animation is with pieces of meat put to piano honky tonk music. Now with Lunacy, his latest feature, it's by far his most assured and confidently insane direction (and rightfully so for this!) and featuring only minimal stop-motion animation. And yet with each passing film I've come across from him- Alice, Faust, Little Otik- he gets a little better each time around. This might explain why when he directs live-action you may not see certain usual things in movies, like with characters talking to the camera when in conversation (not sure if this breaks the 180-degree rule or not), or in a couple of awkward edits or his penchant for close-ups on mouths speaking words. Jan Svankmajer is a filmmaker who started out in animation, and made dozens of short films, most of them in surrealist settings and modes, and it was only when he got into feature films that he used live-action a lot more.
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