Lunacy.

Jan Svankmajer is, of course, a "master" of animation; Salon's Andrew O'Hehir has always recognized that much, but: "I haven't been a huge fan of Svankmajer's forays into live-action feature films. Or not until now... Lunacy which blends the plots of a couple of Edgar Allan Poe stories with the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, is a satirical masterpiece, as rich, dark and sinful as the chocolate cake several characters eat during a blasphemous and memorable sex scene." It is, overall, a "morbid, extravagant and hilarious film" and "a signature work of these terrible times."

Manohla Dargis wouldn't go quite that far. She writes in the New York Times: "Svankmajer's provocations skew toward the intellectual and the shivery rather than the pop and the visceral, and at his best, he doesn't just get under your skin, but also deep in your head, too. Here, unfortunately, he does neither."

"Lunacy may be an ideological argument, but this cavorting, copulating chorus of mindless meat puppets provides the full Svankmajer flavor - as well as a comic metaphor for human existence itself," writes J Hoberman in the Voice.

Slant's Ed Gonzalez: "The film seems designed to jolt the seen-it-all-type and could be considered Svankmajer's The Phantom of Liberty, a milky way of episodic narrative and razor-sharp humor, though the encroaching madness of its main character and the way it doubles back on itself brings to mind a stream of unconsciousness from a greater work by another modern-day surrealist: Mulholland Drive."

The IFC Blog's Alison Willmore finds it "neither frightening nor particularly lurid. It's merely reassuringly Svankmajeresque."

The AV Club's Tasha Robinson gives it a "B+".

Update, 8/11: Steve Erickson for Gay City News: "Sade was a hero to the original surrealists, but Svankmajer seems a little more ambivalent. It's noteworthy that his libertinism has its limits - women are always objects, whether tied up against their will in orgies or used as human canvases at the asylum, in his games, rather than equal participants. In Salò, Pasolini went further, linking Sade's fantasies of torture to the Nazi concentration camps. For Svankmajer, though, the worst thing about the Marquis' ethos is the reactionary response it provoked."

Update, 8/12: Cinematical's Ryan Stewart calls it " a fascinating, confusing and ultimately head-spinning mash-up."

Update, 8/17: Eric Kohn in the New York Press: "Svankmajer's artistry conjures entertainment value from the more unsettling aspects of human woes. Viewing the film walks a fine line between exhilaration and humiliation, but overall it's a blast."

Update, 8/19: Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times: "For all its visual surprises and visceral shocks, Lunacy is still the kind of film that is easier to admire than it is to actually like."

Update, 8/20: Michael Guillen: "Frankly, I found it disturbing enough that tongues and eyes and slabs of meat would be wiggling around, sloshing through mud, and fornicating, but what I found most disturbing was the film's final scene of pieces of meat trapped under supermarket shrinkwrap (a pun, perhaps, on psychology itself?). As if to say all of us have become packaged goods or, at the least, that surrealism commodified has lost its freedom."

Update, 8/23: Earlier: Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Posted by dwhudson at August 10, 2006 3:07 PM