Review of Lunacy (2005) by Peter P — 27 Oct 2010

To make a great art about blasphemy and transgression, what one needs most is a light, delicate touch, a genuine admiration for gentle and childlike innocence, and a sense of humor that is never crude but always conveys the sentiment of wonder when it is most biting. Lunacy, written and directed by the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, is a film that contains many grotesque images, including an extended scene depicting a black mass and numerous sequences involving animated raw meat, but there are innumerable details that are incongruously touching: the lullaby that plays whenever the protagonist dreams his recurring nightmare is both syrupy and menacing, the depraved antagonist who models himself after the Marquis de Sade recounts a moving childhood memory, chickens roam free in the rooms and corridors of an insane asylum, a mute coachman plays an intricate board-game modeled after the tortures inflicted on him and other inmates at an authoritarian institution, moving game-pieces made of bones and rolling a die made of teeth.

Much of the film takes place at an insane asylum where the patients are allowed absolute freedom and the doctors view themselves as equals with the inmates. Thus, it is an institution where there is no difference between health and sickness, between sanity and insanity. It is a damning portrait of the permissive, relativistic society, where anything goes and everything is permitted. The director, to his credit, refuses to idealize this setting, and in fact highlights the ugliness and cruelty, the violence and brutality, that are unleashed when restraint is cast aside and no higher principles are operative in helping the patients recover. But in the third part of the film, the opposite form of social organization takes hold, the authoritarian regime of old-fashioned punishment. The carnival of freedom comes to a bitter end when the less imaginative authorities, who are even more violent, impose order and hierarchy in the form of appallingly brutal cures.

Lunacy is a film that could not have been made by someone born after 1950. Svankmajer has been called the last of the surrealists, the only living exponent of the authentic European avant-garde. That is to say, his work remains curiously untouched and uncontaminated by the sensibilities created by mass culture and consumerism, which have had a determining effect on art and culture in the postwar era, whether in the form of rock and roll, postmodern irony, ideological self-righteousness, etc. Svankmajer lacks that the traits of the earnest sanctimoniousness and defensive hedonism that so widely dominates the late capitalist culture of the West. In other words, Svankmajer retains the wit and delicacy of a earlier, more violent and oppressive age. Much like Luis Bunuel, Svankmajer has the capacity to suffuse apparently ordinary gestures with a haunting grotesqueness. The most disturbing scene in Lunacy is not one showing blasphemy or killing or maiming, but one in which a group of people sit at a table and eat a chocolate cake, with close-ups showing their lips smeared with brown frosting.