Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)

As its title attests "Conspirators of Pleasure" is a film about sex but it's also a Jan Svankmajer film which means that any prurience is going to be tempered with a good deal of surrealism and a certain amount of bizarre comedy. It's also full of the kind of people who, while turned on themselves by the prospect of anything sexual happening to them, are unlikely to turn you on. I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder but Svankmajer goes out of his way to fill the screen with people who, at best, might be described as 'unprepossessing'. It's also a virtually silent picture in that, while there is music and sound effects, there is no dialogue, not that it's needed, and it's virtually plot less as it follows a group of disparate, (desperate?), characters through a series of weird rituals, all of which appear to be sexual in one way or another. Again it's the animated sequences that come off best though in the overall scheme of things I wouldn't say this is one of Svankmajer's finer films. On the plus side, it's certainly not dull and it's quite short.

To describe Jan Svankmajer's film ''Conspirators of Pleasure'' as a live-action cartoon is a little like calling James Joyce's ''Ulysses'' a salty Irish yarn. One of the world's most renowned animators, Mr. Svankmajer, a Czech, is a surrealist visionary whose movies featuring clay figures, marionettes, dolls and eerily life-infused everyday objects have the intensity of fiendishly witty nightmares. ''Conspirators of Pleasure,'' his mostly silent, third feature film, explores the secret erotic fantasies of a group of ordinary Prague residents whose paths are continually crossing. Although it has its quotient of dolls and mannequins, it features six actors whom the director manipulates like animated characters. As they go about their daily routines, they furtively accumulate a bizarre assortment of items that they use to act out elaborately kinky autoerotic rites. Mr. Peony (Peter Meissel), a mild-mannered bachelor, asks his next-door neighbor Mrs. Loubalova (Gabriela Wilhelmova) to slaughter a chicken for him. After using the carcass as a model to construct a papier-mache rooster's head from torn-up pornographic photos, he glues on the chicken feathers and fashions bat wings out of cut-up umbrellas. Donning the rooster head, into which he has carved eye holes, and strapping on the bat wings, he metamorphoses into a ludicrous predatory bird that murders a life-size effigy of the woman next door by levitating and dropping a papier- mache rock onto her head. Mrs. Loubalova harbors a similarly homicidal lust for Mr. Peony. In a quasi-religious ceremony conducted in a candlelit crypt, she first whips, then drowns his effigy by repeatedly dunking its head into a basin. The solo rituals of four other obsessive fantasists are interwoven with those of Mr. Peony and Mrs. Loubalova. Mrs. Malkova (Barbora Hrzanova), the neighborhood mail deliverer, shreds the insides of a loaf of bread into round little balls that she voraciously sucks into her nose through tubes. Mr. Kula (Jiri Labus), the newspaper vendor from whom Mr. Peony buys his girlie magazines, constructs a Rube Goldberg-like contraption attached to his television set that massages him when his favorite news announcer, Mrs. Beltinska (Anna Wetlinska), delivers the nightly news. While he ardently kisses the screen on which she appears, she achieves orgasmic bliss by having her toes sucked by two pet fish concealed under her desk in a tub. Meanwhile, her husband, the police commissioner (Pavel Novy), sneaks off to indulge in his own masochistic rite, vigorously scrubbing his body with rolling pins covered with feathers and nails. ''Conspirators of Pleasure,'' whose final credits acknowledge inspirations that include Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel and the Marquis de Sade, is seriously funny and cheekily subversive. In having its six characters be ordinary people with extraordinary fantasies, the film portrays the erotic impulse of everyday life as a wild, chaotic, antisocial force that lends people their sense of individuality. But Mr. Svankmajer's vision is much more than a surrealistic rendering of standard Freudian notions of repression and sublimation. Encountering one another through the day, these obsessive ritualists exchange the sly, knowing glances of conspirators in a political plot. Not only do they recognize one another as ''freaks,'' to use contemporary parlance, but their unquenchable perversity also unites them in a shared resistance to the puritanical conformism of Eastern European culture (or at least that culture before the fall of Communism). Their pleasure-seeking also involves covert collaboration. For example, the bread balls that Mrs. Malkova sucks into her nostrils feed the fish that nibble on Mrs. Beltinska's toes. The technique of the film is as sly as its characters. At first you have no idea why these people are accumulating such an odd assortment of items. As the pace quickens, the film coaxes the viewer into becoming a voyeur and tacit collaborator in these pseudo-pornographic scenarios. Ultimately, a real crime is committed that eerily mirrors the zany erotic games that have come before. Having celebrated its characters' erotic fantasies, the movie reminds us that the line separating kinky fantasies from heinous real-life crimes can be awfully thin.

Slave/Master -- Sacher Masoch -- Sade, Marquis de -- SvankMajer. All S&M - purely by coincidence?The liner notes and end credits of Conspirators of Pleasure list Max Ernst, Sacher Masoch, Marquis de Sade and Luis Buñuel as inspirations and or sources, planting Svankmajer's film firmly on the map of surrealist experimentation and with little doubt, denoting it as social and political commentary. Sexuality is employed to both present and represent socio-political disorders affected by the taut political tensions and trying social circumstances in everyday Eastern Europe.Power relations between two tenants take the form of S&M, and repressed sexuality emerge in multifarious perverse ways in a city constantly spying on its citizens, where moments of privacy have to be enacted in strict interiors like closets and the imagination for fear of discovery and public shaming. Thrift stores where everyday items are salvaged turn out to be the sites providing raw materials for building and enacting sexual fantasies.In Conspirators of Pleasure, sexual perversion and fetishes come across as symptomatic of a larger social and political neurosis. Yet, the end result of a film built on such an idea doesn't come across as staid, but superbly entertaining and wry, helped in no small part by the supremely brilliant realization by Svankmajer. Conspirators of Pleasure is a winner and a must-watch.

I very much enjoyed Svankmajer's "Faust" so I was happy (and not ashamed) to pick this up from the same spot (hooray for libraries!). It could be that Svankmajer is trying to isolate fetishism from an explicit sexual nature...the film quickly moves beyond the porn shop purchase to more vivid and involved flights of fantasy. The stop-frame animation itself lends a frenetic feeling, and the story does jump between several substories loosely united by interactions. Despite those facets, it seemed to move slowly, circling around some of the same images like a crazed chicken, or a fish in a tiny tub.Perhaps the message is that everyone has their itch to scratch...but the nails never really did dig in for me. And if everyone is odd, then nothing is odd. This film sort of had that effect on me. A mildly profound statement, but ultimately, I suspect, an untrue one.Not that there's anything wrong with you...nor me and my obsessive film reviewing...Without saying too much about the actual "action", there is also a potential conclusion drawn from the film's flimsy plot that the boundary between imagination and reality might be more permeable than we suspect. That gave a little injection.For those who find humor in this, I didn't. The closets? Yawn... Well maybe the recurring musical themes, especially the operatic baritone blast. The stories intermingle without ever interlocking. A more studied viewing may help more, it would not surprise me if there were some sort of secret decoder to the blood, bread, fish and further fetishes on display... But for me it just wound up as a sort of a coq-up.Though a visually memorable one. Snorting the little crumb balls will remain with me. I actually preferred the shorter entrees from the "Food" chain of films served with this DVD. More focused and smaller in scope and time, but plenty of fantastic creativity with clay and otherwise. Especially the infinite breakfast club.