Lunacy
(118 mins, nc)
Directed by Jan Švankmajer; starring Pavel Liška, Jan Tříska, Anna Geislerová, Martin Huba

An artist with a similar interest in the perverse is at the centre of Lunacy, a live action movie by the brilliant Czech surreal animator, Jan Švankmajer. He’s the Marquis de Sade, the setting is a weird cross between the present and 18th-century France, and the pivotal character a young man taken under de Sade’s wing. The lad is troubled by dreams of being carted off in a straitjacket. The themes are freedom versus oppression, anarchy versus authoritarianism, and Švankmajer questions the difference between the lunatics and the people running the asylum. There are brilliant moments here and recurrent images (done with stop-motion photography) of animals’ tongues and slices of meat running amok, writhing, copulating and being turned into mincemeat.