Lunacy (Sileni)
``Lunacy" opens with the legendary Czech animator/filmmaker Jan Svankmajer addressing the audience. ``Ladies and gentlemen," he says dryly, ``what you are about to see is a horror film, with all the degeneracy peculiar to the genre. It is not a work of art. Today, art is all but dead."
Perhaps, but Svankmajer isn't above re-animating the corpse. His new film, the 72-year-old director's fourth feature in a lifetime of disquietingly surreal shorts, may be his ``infantile tribute" to Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, and an ``ideological debate on how to run an insane asylum," but it's also extreme cinema at its most unyielding. The spirit of Svankmajer's countryman, Franz Kafka, also hangs over this mix of live-action and stop-motion imagery, as does the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Life in ``Lunacy" is nasty, brutish, and prolonged.
The plot, derived from two Poe stories, concerns a naive young traveler named Jean (Pavel Liska) who is afflicted with terrifying dreams in which hospital orderlies come to take him away. Upon awaking at an inn, he is befriended by a manic Marquis (Jan Triska), who takes him to the lunatic asylum over which he presides with chief supervisor Dr. Murlloppe (Jaroslav Dusek).
Or are these two in fact escaped inmates who are keeping the real asylum head, Dr. Coulmiere (Martin Huba), tarred and feathered in a basement cell? The pretty, attenuated Charlotte (Anna Geislerova) assures Jean it's so and pledges eternal love to the young sap.
Between these live-action segments, Svankmajer uncorks his patented stop-motion wizardry, which involves pieces of animated meat, severed cow tongues, and eyeballs slithering across floors and into skulls. These serve as repugnant palate cleansers to the main drama, a counter-melody reminding us that all is decay. If you've seen such previous works as the filmmaker's 1988 ``Alice," you know what to expect, but ``Lunacy" is, if anything, even darker.
It's also rather predictable, and that is a surprise coming from Svankmajer. The contrasting acting styles of Liska and Triska -- the young man appearing comatose, the older man delivering his enthusiastic de Sade monologues straight from the bottle -- result in a lopsided narrative where the outcome is both unpleasant and preordained. At nearly two hours ``Lunacy" becomes repetitive, at first ingeniously and then with a slowly dulling edge. The meat parade ceases to shock.
How does one run this insane asylum? Offer the inmates complete freedom, or treat them to a strict regimen of control and punishment? Svankmajer reminds us there's a third way ``which exacerbates the worst aspects of both," and that ``that is the madhouse we are living in today." ``Lunacy," playing at the MFA as part of the ``Rare Bohemian Cinema" series, puts its allegory through the grinder and cranks until all that's left is the sausage.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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