Review: Lunacy

Lunacy begins with an homage to the introduction of James Whales' Frankenstein, in which Edward van Sloan appears on a stage and warns us, the audience members: "I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even...horrify you..." Here, director Jan Svankmajer appears on screen and offers a much lower appraisal of his own work: "What you're about to see is a horror film. It is not a work of art. Today, art is all but dead anyway." After watching his film, I may be inclined to agree. Lunacy is a fascinating, confusing and ultimately head-spinning mash-up of some minor Edgar Allen Poe and the hedonist excess 'philosophy' of the Marquis de Sade, all bundled together in a film that seems to have been lensed around 1974.

I'm drumming my fingers on the keyboard to think of a way to describe the film's other key element -- meat. Lots of meat. Slabs of uncooked steak, created in stop-motion animation, appear every five minutes or so in this picture. We cut to them, jiggling and dancing like the "Let's All Go to the Lobby" hot dogs in movie concession ads, backed by calliope music. Apparently, the director felt he needed this to hammer home the 'We Are Nothing But Meat' message he was trying to convey, in case we didn't get it from the scene in which the Marquis' dinner guests are ritually fellated by girls with mouths full of chocolate cake.

Pavel Liska plays Jean Berlot, a lunatic rotting away in a Czech nuthouse who may or may not be dreaming all of this up, depending on how you look at it. He first greets the Marquis de Sade (Jan Triska) as a fellow patient inside the hospital, which sounds about right -- only how did this Marquis come across a wig and coat and other 18th century garb unless he really is who he says? Soon Berlot is outside the gates and traveling across the countryside in the Marquis' coach, and listening to him spew invective against both nature and God, entities he detests with equal furor. The Marquis' lips curl as he rails against "a mischievous God who deserves only our hatred and our vengeance!" His large and spacious estate has a rumpus room, where he hammers nails into a crucified likeness of Christ for stress relief, and paints red crucifixes on the behinds of naked young women immediately before having them raped by his minions. "Punish me for insulting you!", he screams at the sky. He's determined to get God's attention one way or another. Bound by the neck with a large, iron chain and occasionally possessed by the devil is his concubine Charlotte, played by Anna Geislerova, an actress who looks eerily like Bryce Dallas Howard.

Charlotte and the hapless Berlot escape from the Marquis' chambers while he's donning a kind of wooden Wicker King gas mask and being fellated by a girl as she's held down by two other men. (Cut to our heroes, the steaks, putting on a puppet show ...) It's one of many times that Berlot will attempt some kind of escape only to end up right back in the company of the Marquis, which suggests that some kind of dream logic is the prime mover in the film. Charlotte will play the role of his quasi-love interest as he assists the Marquis in "purgative therapy," which means indulging his fantasy of being buried alive, and so forth. There's a long interlude about getting a coffin into a crypt where it belongs; this is presumably where the Poe material comes into play. Eventually, a new character named Dr. Murlloppe is introduced; he represents a counterweight to the positions and philosophies of the Marquis. They have differing ideas about what causes mental illness and how it can be cured. We learn that together Murlloppe and the Marquis kidnapped the real warden of the mental asylum, tarred and feathered him, and locked him in a basement cell, where he now stands and grips the bars, like some literal Birdman of Alcatraz. With the warden safely jailed, The Marquis and Murlloppe have free reign to use the asylum's patients for their various experiments. Still with me?

There are a few late plot twists, a secret key that unlocks a secret refrigerator, a crash-out of the asylum's other mental patients and lots of other head-spinning developments that would require at least three viewings to sort out. The film is dialogue-heavy, bursting with so many ideas and proposals about the proper ways to test and improve the mental well-being of asylum inmates that you have to believe the director expects all of this to be taken seriously. It isn't just a clothesline on which to hang the interesting perversions of the Marquis, nor is it the horror film promised in the prologue; it's some kind of insane treatise on insanity, directed by a man who's clearly insane. Since I've only seen the film once, I can't even fathom how the story of the steaks is supposed to enter into the equation. In one scene, we actually see the steaks getting into a bed and pulling covers over themselves. By the end of the film, they are cellophaned and neatly packaged in a grocery store, distinguishable from the other meats because they have a pulsating heart-beat. They seem happy. I see a Disney animated adventure in their future.