Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 4, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Having examined the American fright features populating the Tribeca Film Festival’s Midnight collection, it’s high time to look at a pair of European genre movies playing the event. One of them is actually part of the Spotlight section instead, as Lunacy writer/director Jan Svankmajer, at age 71, now qualifies as a Grand Old Man of oddball cinema as opposed to the young turks populating the Midnight realm. And despite its title, Lunacy (pictured above) may be the least “mad” of Svankmajer’s features, committing (pardon the pun) to a straightforward story interspersed with the filmmaker’s traditional surreal stop-motion animation.
In an onscreen introduction, the filmmaker describes his latest work as “a horror film, with all the degeneracy of the genre,” and is interrupted by a fleshy animated tongue skittering past his feet. That’s a sign of things to come, as the stop-motion isn’t nearly as integral to the rest of the movie as it was in Svankmajer’s previous Little Otik, where it helped bring the title character to life. Every so often, Lunacy’s live action simply takes a break to allow pixilated beef and organs to cavort across the screen, and while these sequences have an amusingly visceral appeal, they don’t seem to have much to do with the, ahem, meat of the story. Perhaps there’s some subtextual connection I’m missing, but these bits come off as a sideshow attraction, separate from the carnival of insanity the film proper depicts.
Borrowing (by Svankmajer’s own admission) from the writings of both Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, Lunacy finds a young man named Jean (Pavel Liska) traveling through what appears to be the 18th century, though a horse-drawn coach crosses an overpass above a highway teeming with modern cars in one scene, and a decidedly period hospital has computers on its desks. Plagued by nocturnal fantasies of men in white coats coming to take him away, Jean falls in with the Marquis (Jan Triska), a hedonist who has rejected God (“A feeble creature incapable of making people behave how he wants”) and indulges in blasphemous ceremonies involving religious iconography and naked girls that are right out of a ’70s Eurosleaze flick. He also has an extremely direct approach to therapy, demonstrating to the startled Jean (in the movie’s best extended sequence) his own treatment for his fears of being buried alive before suggesting the young man spend some time in a nearby asylum.
Jean goes along with the plan, but it soon becomes clear that the inmates have taken over, and, led by faux Dr. Murlloppe (Jaroslav Dusek), they demonstrate the virtues of freedom and indulgence as the cure for what mentally ails you. Svankmajer aims to illustrate the argument over whether this sort of intemperance or strong discipline is the right corrective, but it’s pretty clear which side he’s on from the outset, and the pontificating goes on for a while after he has made his point. Like Little Otik, this feature (which runs a shade over two hours), could stand to be trimmed by about 20 minutes, which would allow its many scenes that do work to have more impact. A number of the best moments occur in the first half, when the deliciously nutty Triska is center stage, making a very strong case that it’s better to be a little crazy than to straitjacket yourself in accepted notions of sanity.
What doesn’t falter throughout is Svankmajer’s commitment to his odd vision of dueling brands of madness; even when the narrative interest wanes, there’s always the sense of a filmmaker with a specific vision that carries throughout the movie. And then there’s Sheitan, which is the kind of film that throws 90 minutes of weird stuff against the wall and sees what sticks.
Directed and co-written by French feature first-timer Kim Chapiron, Sheitan’s scenario is somewhat reminiscent of Hostel, kicking off with a multiculti trio of male buddies getting thrown out of a nightclub for bad behavior. They’ve hooked up with a couple of cute girls, one of whom suggests they travel out to her mansion in the country, and they haven’t even arrived at the place when they encounter the place’s caretaker, Joseph (Vincent Cassel), a very odd sort who takes a shine to Bart (Olivier Bartélémy), the white member of the three. At the same time, Joseph seems anxious to hook Bart up with Jeanne (Julie-Marie Parmentier), a sexually precocious girl who, in one of the movie’s more gratuitous grasps for outrage, graphically pleasures Bart’s dog.
Things get even more twisted when the action comes to center on the mansion; not to give too much away, but creepy dolls, a pregnant woman and a suggestion of Satanism are among the elements. There’s also abundant nudity of both sexes, and ultimately graphic gore, all played with a gritty rural veneer reminiscent of another recent French shocker, High Tension. But whereas that film had a strong and empathetic heroine at the center of its grotesquerie, there’s no one here to really identify with—no one to carry the audience with them on the wild ride. The three guys are all louts, and it’s hard to care when the horrors are inflicted upon them; indeed, there are suggestions that what they’re suffering is literally hellish punishment for their misbehavior (“Sheitan” is a term for the devil, the club where the action starts is called Styxxx, etc.). Yet the film doesn’t coherently develop or follow through with this idea, preferring to end in a tangled welter of bizarro images that don’t add up to much.
The most engaging character, in fact, is Joseph, played by Cassel with big ugly dentures and a sardonic gleam in his eye. He gives the movie a spark of hedonistic life whenever he’s on screen, which makes his scenes fun to watch but kind of unbalances the movie; with a villain possessing so much more personality than the people he’s tormenting, it’s hard to feel much fear, and Sheitan remains perverse without becoming genuinely disturbing. Still, it is outré enough to qualify as the most “midnight” (even bearing superficial similarities to cult champ The Rocky Horror Picture Show) of all the genre movies in Tribeca’s Midnight series.
