Conspirators of Pleasure

In his most original (at least from what I've seen), very different from his other films, most disturbing yet most hilarious film, the great magician Jan Svankmajer, animator-surrealist from Prague, makes his modern-day city the setting for the story of six ordinary people with extraordinary fantasies. The film that acknowledges as inspirations Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel (the admitted fetishist himself) and the Marquis De Sade (all of them I am sure would love it) portrays the strange world of hidden fetishes that can be found in the most unexpected places. Three men and three women encounter one another through the day and exchange the knowing glances even though some of them don't even know each other but there is a certain connection and they feel it. They all are "conspirators of pleasure" who spend the most part of the film meticulously, painstakingly and creatively inventing methods, tools and constructions for fulfilling their bizarre fantasies. We will observe chicken suit with the wings made of umbrellas. There is a woman-post worker with a fetish for bread. She rolls up balls of bread and sucks them up her nose through a straw (honestly, not my idea of fun but hey, you should see the look at her face). There are unusual brushes made up of rolling pins, pan lids, and stolen pieces of fur that one man, the detective rubs over his body while his wife, the TV news-person feels neglected and buys some live carp that she strokes and feeds them the bread balls which were delivered by the post worker. The TV lady has no idea that she's been an object of a newsagent- guy's desire. He constructed the machine that consisted of several mechanic arms which can hug, stroke, rub, pull...gently while he watches her on TV and reaches his climax at the same time as she does helped by her carps but I am going to stop right here and only add that "some of our most exciting sexual experiences take place entirely within the minds of other people." (Roger Ebert - not about "Conspirators of Pleasure" but I thought it'd fit perfectly here)

What can I say? The film is a satire on human perversion but what makes it unique, its style. It has no dialog whatsoever but it is not needed, really. The lust and desires don't need words, they speak for themselves. There are the moments in the film when you'd look in total disbelieve at the weird characters and their bizzar objects of longing but you just cant help smiling. It's been over the year since I discovered Svankmajer and I've been trying to see anything that he's made. He's never disappointed me. He looks inside my mind, takes the the hidden desires and weird fetishes that I would never want to be uncovered and I would only admit to myself I have, turns them into the images hellishly disturbing but mesmerizing and hilarious and threw them back at me using his unmatched and brilliant (sorry, I have to use this word) combination of live action film-making, special effects, and his deservingly celebrated animations techniques.

Masterpiece of perversion, the fetish movie to end all fetishes.

Long Live Jan Svankmajer!

8/10

This is my favorite full-length Svankmajer film, and not just because the lack of dialogue leaves no room for poor casting decisions in the dub for the American release (see Alice).

Besides the fact that fetish films are better or worse depending on the level of weirdness in the fetishes portrayed, this subject compliments Svankmajer's style perfectly.

The Kino DVD release comes with a bonus short film, Food, which illustrates what I'm talking about perfectly. Food is typical Svankmajer in how meticulously the temporal details are. If we see one man eating a full breakfast out of another man's vending-organs, the next man in line's breakfast has to be given the same time and detailed effort in portraying.

Likewise, Conspirators of Pleasure leaves nothing to the imagination but the story. But that's what fetishes are all about. Perverse in their contortion of sexual mores but perverse also in their slavery to the mundane details and meticulous planning.

This is a very worthwhile study in perversity that doubles as pretty straightforward and blunt surrealism.

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.

The movie opens with decadent pictures of masturbation and bestiality, but the film itself isn't that offensive. It's often very funny, and some of the things we see are just wrong, so how could it possibly be offensive? It'd have to be bad to be offensive, and this is spectacular. The story itself concerns a handful of people who have a connection in one way or another -- a fat woman, who lives next door to a bearded man, who buys porn from a beady-eyed man; the mailwoman who delivers to the bearded man, and the mustached man seen by the bearded man in an antique shop. The movie is filled with deliciously gooey sexual symbolism and would make an interesting double bill with "Crash." (Though unfortunately for a film so concerned with the odd things that we see, the film itself has got that dull, brown look to it that seems common with European productions.)

The film is dialogue free, and there's an especially good use of music and sound effects to more than make up for it (we can almost experience tactilely their sense of pleasure, the ecstasy of the mustached man who massages and prickles his wet, hairy skin with various types of bristled brushes); it's better that it's silent, because it gives a fuller feeling of the audience as voyeurs peeping in on these individuals' various sexual exploits, who create objects that satisfy their needs. There are some scenes that are just...the weirdest things I think I've ever seen, or at least certainly up there: a woman rolling up pieces of bread between her fingers and then snorting them up her nose later on in the picture. Or my favorite, the climactic scene with the bearded man dressed as a rooster, with umbrellas for wings, attacking a dummy made to look like that female neighbor. (She herself has her own dummy made in his image that she uses for S&M enactments.) But more than just surrealism -- and this is pretty surreal (meaning that it's real but bent) -- it makes a pretty powerful statement on the dullness of home life, whether you're single or paired off. 9/10

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.