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Meaty movie experience is sheer 'Lunacy'

Jan Svankmajer opens "Lunacy," his silly romp in the macabre, with a personal preamble that's more cop-out than disclaimer. With a frosty beard and genteel poise, the Czech filmmaker tells the camera that what follows is a work of horror, featuring "all of the degeneracy peculiar to that genre."

"It is not a work of art," he says, adding, "Art is dead."

Zeitgeist Films 'Lunacy' ('Sílení') 2 out of 5 stars The verdict: Hit-and-miss horror tale conveys a grim world view through allegory — and dancing steaks. Director: Jan Svankmajer Starring: Pavel Liska, Jan Triska, Anna Geislerová, Martin Huba, Jaroslav Dusek Run time: 118 minutes Release date: August 9, 2006 Language: Czech with English subtitles. Rating: Not rated; includes violence, nudity, strong sexuality. On the web Official movie site Rate 'Lunacy' Go see it 50.00% 5 Make it a matinee 10.00% 1 Wait to rent 20.00% 2 Don't bother 20.00% 2

How convenient for Svankmajer, the famed animator known best for his striking stop-motion puppet adaptations of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Faust." He's let himself off the hook. Art is dead — trite and specious refuge for marginal artists — so the director is absolved from trying to make art. In "Lunacy" he opts instead for "an infantile tribute" to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade.

But wait. Before his speech ends, Svankmajer contradicts himself. Bristling with blasphemous visions and chunks of perambulating raw meat, "Lunacy," he says, is an allegory about freedom and repression, the story's lunatic asylum standing in for the world today: a madhouse run by madmen.

Sounds like art to me, if none too fresh. Svankmajer compensates for a lack of thematic inspiration with his signature visual exuberance, which takes the form of frolicsome grotesqueries and high-volume atmospherics. Twitchy stop-motion animation literally slides and crawls (and slurps and squishes) amid the live-action bulk of the movie. His idea of "infantile" is really just juvenile absurdism, as so much surrealism is.

For this grim comedy, Svankmajer conflates two Poe tales ("The Premature Burial" and "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether") and lurid passages from de Sade, trussing them together with his own plot thread, the hero's journey to hell. It begins when a depraved Marquess (Jan Tr’ska) comes to the aid of the hapless young Jean, a born victim with spooked eyes played wearily by Pavel Liska.

The men are united by vague Oedipal issues, but the Marquess is an entirely different beast than the retiring Jean. At his fog-lined estate, the older man unveils himself as someone mortally disappointed in the notion of God, conducting unholy rituals of rape, degradation, gluttony and wanton thumb-sucking. Once Jean sees this, it is too late. He is the Marquess' captive subject, spirited away to an insane asylum teeming with baroque anarchy — clouds of chicken feathers, naked men roving and raving — befitting de Sade.

"Lunacy" looks and feels like it's set in the late 18th century. A patina of Old Europe grime and squalor coats everything. Yet powdered wigs and horse-drawn carriages rub against cars, a bus and Jean's blue jeans. These deliberate anachronisms in Svankmajer's period pastiche are to remind us that the struggle for individual freedom is a timeless one.

Svankmajer packs the psychological horror with visceral spectacle — literally, viscera. He divides live-action scenes with absurd stop-motion interludes showing real cow tongues, eyeballs and brains inching across floors and performing other anthropomorphized acts, as if to say that humans, too, are just pieces of meat that can be sliced up and packaged for the market. (The film's final shot bears this out.) These goofy bits — dancing steaks! beer-lapping tongues! — echo at once "Gumby" and the dark Dada whimsy of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animation. Its brazen perversity makes you laugh.

But not as much as Svankmajer probably wants. Playful and indulgent though "Lunacy" is, it is only superficially stimulating. Often, like much of the director's work, its mechanical nature has a chilling effect.

Svankmajer comes off as the brooding Eastern European pessimist who thrives on hearing himself complain about the hopeless darkness of it all. Pessimism is doubtless lousy for the pessimist, yet his bleak views of life and humanity certainly fuel Svankmajer. He can mourn this bleakness through his art, but he can't divorce them. Without them he has no canvas. Only then will art be dead.