Directed by: Jan Svankmajer
Edgar Allen Poe, Marquis De Sade, promises of impressive yuckiness, and "frisky meat puppets!" I'm sold baby and I was ever since the first time I read about the strange flick from Czech film maker Jan Svankmajer. If your familiar with any of the director's other works such as, Alice and Faust maybe the many clips of energetic and sometimes horny meat wont seem quite so strange. Yes. Meat. Crazy people and lots and lots of meat. Vegetarians and innocent Czech men, be warned. There is no escaping man's constant battle with sanity, or the violent techniques of a big old nut house, doomed to destroy itself.
Drawing inspiration from the writings of infamous loony, the Marquis De Sade, and two of Poe's chilling stories(which I had to look up cause I'm so rusty on my Poe) the film is seeped in a moody very black comedy. Jean Berlot (Pavel Liska) suffers panicked nightmares that cause him to have destructive effects on the room he happens to be in, be it hotel or mental institution. After one of these episodes he is befriended by our modern day marquis(Jan Triska) who, after some lively and non conventional disscussion, brings him to his home. And that's where all the surreal debauchery begins.
The marquis is holding cake eating, fuck fests as a form of carnal therapy and it was all a little blasphemous for Jean's liking. Despite the marquis' heated arguments against mother nature and God, Jean is still not convinced that this is going to fix his head. No. It isn't until the guy chokes on a banana, gets Jean to bury him, and then pops back to life, that Jean agrees to go to an innovative sanatorium.
The patients are enabled and encouraged to act on their delusions with absolute freedom. I mean, there are some preventive measures intact. It's safer to bang your head against a pillow then a bare stone pillar. Of course!! As if the free roaming chickens and extreme Pollock art classes aren't enough there is a beautiful woman, Charlotte(Aňa Geislerová), who needs rescuing. Jean failed to follow a classic horror rule, get out while you can and whatever you do, don't sign yourself into the crazy house. And you probably should remember to be careful who you fall in love with in this kinda setting.
As Jean searches for the original staff, who Charlotte claims is tucked away somewhere after a recent mutiny, we all realize there's not a single character with a clear intention for the poor guy. All his good intentions could not cancel out his mistake in trusting that freaky deaky girl. Things get much worse instead of better, though I guess it depends on how you look at it. Would you rather attend a ritualistic fuck fest or get your tongue cut out.
Oh and meat. Scattered quite frequently between scenes are stop motion steaks, tongues, eyeballs, and pulsing ground meat. They were pretty damn frisky and about as literal as "frisky meat puppet" can get. Svankmajer is a big fan of the stop motion and while I have to admit, seeing that meat roll around in the dirt and mate with each other was pretty damn cool, it lost it's potency before the first half of the movie was finished. There's only so much meat a person can handle. Every 10 minutes...I pray for the well being of the crew and only hoped they washed their hands often.
Lunacy is a one viewing only movie and it's not that for everyone. It is a very slow moving 118 mins. that's absolutely unavoidable. I had committed. I had to finish. Every time I thought I was following along just fine that damn meat with writhe in and marinate everything in it's repetitiveness. I probably won't watch Lunacy again but I am glad that I did watch it. The one time.
All of the actors were very convincing in their roles, using nudity, betrayal, insanity, and over all debauchery to get the character across. And the characters did have a very thought provoking question to ask. What is more freighting? Absolute freedom and indulgence or absolute restriction and punishment? Come to think of it, who was the craziest person in the place? Everything took a delightfully surreal, turn for the worse which I always appreciate but I think that spoke for itself. I don't often like when the director needs to explain the movie before the movie. Didn't work for me in the past and I thought it was unnecessary in Lunacy.
When it comes to my recommendation... I guess I have to ask you...how do you feel about meat and crazy people? You like um? Do you love um?
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