There is something a little sad about finding that a favorite director has produced a work that is so off-putting that one would have to think twice before choosing to watch it again. Such is the unfortunate problem I have with this 2005 movie (not yet on DVD) from veteran Czech writer/director/animator/puppeteer Jan Svankmajer.
I have been a big, big fan since I first saw his 1988 riff on the Alice in Wonderland story, Alice, with its mix of live action, animated toys, and tumbling everyday objects. So I sought out his short animations, which are amazing, and was similarly taken with his full-length feature films: Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), and most recently Little Otik (2000). Despite the occasional blackness of these tales, one also found a certain playfulness, which is totally missing from his newest film. Perhaps as one grows older one also grows more cynical and pessimistic, and this great talent is now 72.
The movie begins with a voiceover introduction from Svankmajer himself, explaining that we are about to watch a horror film "with all the degeneracy of the genre," inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade. References to both, but particularly the latter, are discernible throughout the movie. However, in no way is this a horror film in the traditional sense. Rather it is a philosophic exposition on how the madness in our world can only be dealt with by brutal force.
The first of the two main characters is a rather simple young man, played by Pavel Liska, whose mother has just died in the insane asylum at Charenton and who has nightmares about being locked away himself. The other main character is a more worldly man, referred to only as the Marquis, played by Jan Triska. While we appear to be in the modern world, the Marquis seems to exist in another era as well. He wears old-fashioned clothes, has a courtly manner (on the surface), and gets about in a horse-drawn carriage in the same time and space as buses and motorcars.
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