Lunacy Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Living in the past

The BFI says that Lunacy, Svankmajer's fifth film is 'the apotheosis of his career, if not his masterpiece'. They know best, I suppose, but I remember being more impressed by another of his films I saw more than a decade ago (I think it may have been Faust). There again, the first cut is the deepest.

If you haven't seen any of Svankmajer's brilliant, surreal and idiosyncratic movies, I would highly recommend them. They are best known for their animated sequences. In the case of Lunacy, dead animal meat, tongues, eyes and innards crawl across dusty floors to reunite and reanimate sheep skulls. It's supposed to be horrid. Cribbing again from the BFI notes: 'the filmmaker has expounded the virtues of an active pursuit of repulsion'.

What really struck me about Lunacy is that it was like a film made decades ago. I don’t think this is a deliberate retro look, it's just Svankmajer doesn't seem to have changed his style over the years. So Lunacy is more of the same but there’s a bit too much of it: the film's a tad too long; some editing wouldn’t have gone amiss. It was a bit too slow in saying what it had to say.

What it had to say is that there are two ways to treat lunatics: total freedom or total control? Take the worst of both systems and that's what the World is like today. I'm not writing a spoiler here because, for some reason, Svankmajer tells the audience this in a piece to camera before the film starts. Except he wasn't balanced in his view of treating the unbalanced: total freedom was nice and benign, with a large dose of 'let’s laugh at the loonies'; total control was totally nasty and sadistic.

In his pep talk, Svankmajer also tells of his borrowings from Edgar Allen Poe ('The Premature Burial' and 'The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. Fether') and (those BFI notes once more) 'the libertine spirit and rhetoric of the Marquis de Sade'. On the subject of borrowings, the squinting sadistic grin of the Marquis, as well as the sex scenes, reminded me very much of that other de Sade-inspired movie, Salo (1975). The early scenes in the Inn also put me in mind of a much more recent and excellent adaptation of Kafka's 'The Castle', though I don’t remember the details of this film.

Whether you think Lunacy is Svankmajer's best or not, the great thing is you don't have to make the trek to London on the few days a decade it's showing at the BFI, you can rent it from on this web site. So, go mad, and add Lunacy to your 'queue of unique titles'!