A man who fears he's edging into madness gets a fresh perspective on what insanity really means in this frantic, visually inventive black comedy from Czech auteur Jan Svankmajer. Jean (Pavel Liska) is a deeply troubled man who has been haunted by violent hallucinations since the death of his mother, who was committed to a mental institution when she passed on. While arranging his mother's funeral, Jean meets a fellow inmate who claims to be the Marquis de Sade (Jan Triska), and lives as if he's
in 18th Century France rather than the Czech Republic in 2005. Jean strikes up an alliance with de Sade, though they can hardly be called friends, and after becoming an unwilling accomplice to de Sade's debauchery, Jean joins him at a hospital run by Dr. Murlloppe (Jaroslav Dusek), who offers "Purgative Therapy" for people who aren't mad but could be in the future. Jean falls for a beautiful nurse named Charlota (Anna Geislerova) who claims she's being held at the hospital against her will; in time, Jean hatches a plan to liberate her and the inmates, though he learns the truth is even more disturbing than he's been led to believe. Punctuated by animated tableaux in which raw meat scampers about the screen through the magic of stop-motion animation, Lunacy (aka Sileni) was inspired in part by the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe as well as the writings of de Sade, which are quoted liberally in the film. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
While Lunacy leaves you with the impression that Svankmajer is more expressive with cutlets than he is with his atypically human-dominated dreamscape, some of the images are doozies.
Fans of movies about inmates who take over an asylum -- King of Hearts and Marat/Sade are prime examples -- will be amused by this surrealistic take on the subject punctuated by animated interludes featuring, of all things, dancing meat.
Connoisseurs of the disgustingly visceral will find Jan Svankmajer hardly mellowed at 72. Lunacy is dark, scary, and yucky -- even by the Czech animator's own standards.
By turns absurdly funny, disturbingly dissolute, unnervingly claustrophobic, and caustically misanthropic, Lunacy offers viewers the sort of punishing pleasures that so many of its characters seem, in their different ways, to seek.
The definition of liberation as the act of being delivered from the hands of one lunatic into the hands of another who is equally mad remains universal in its political and social applications.
A mentally unstable man meets a modern day Marquis de Sade who holds blasphemous rituals in his basement and convinces his guest to commit himself to an insane asylum run by the inmates. In between scenes we see clips of steaks and disembodied tongues slithering about. It's bizarre, but not the strangest from
surrealist animator Svankmejer; if you squint hard, it even looks like an ordinary horror movie. The tag line says it best: "Edgar Allen Poe + the Marquis de Sade + Jan Svankmejer = Lunacy."
July 7, 2011
Greg S
Super Reviewer
If you're not familiar with Svankmajer's unique style of finding the endearing in the disgusting, nor grown accustomed to his meat puppets or skeletal animals, you might find this movie somewhat aversive at first - hopefully only to discover its brilliance in the end.
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