Lunacy (2005)

I have always been a big, big fan of the Czech animator/writer/director Jan Svankmajer ever since I first saw his version of the Alice in Wonderland story from 1988.  Subsequently I have sought out his short animations and have really been very taken with his full-length features "Faust", "Conspirators of Pleasure", and "Little Otik".  However, one unhappy result of this year's London Film Festival has been to put me off some of my favourites.  I have written below about Aki Kaurismaki and this latest feature from Svankmajer was so black and disturbing that I would need to think twice before wanting to view it again.  Perhaps as one grows older and this great talent is now 72, one grows more cynical and pessimistic about the world in which we live.  The film begins with a voiceover introduction from the director himself, explaining that we are about to view a horror film, inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade, and references to both, but particularly the latter are discernible throughout the film.  However this is not a horror film in the traditional sense, but rather a philosophical exposition of how the madness in our world can only be dealt with by brutal force.

The two main characters are a rather simple young man whose mother has just died in the insane asylum at Charenton and who has nightmares about being locked away himself and another more worldly man, referred to only as the Marquis.  While we appear to be in the modern world, the Marquis seems backdated to another period -- in his dress, his courtly manner on the surface, and the fact that he gets about in a horse-drawn carriage in the same time and space as buses and motorcars.  The gist of the tale is about the lunatics taking over the asylum until by the end we can no longer tell just who are the madmen and which, if any, of the characters are sane.  This is punctuated throughout by the most disturbing animations of fast-moving, encroaching meat and animal tongues that I have ever seen; it was seriously disturbing enough to turn one into a vegetarian.  I don't know quite what Svankmajer was saying here, except to suggest that we are all nothing more than meat to be ground up and spit out by the modern world.  But whatever, it was dead upsetting and depressing.