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| Issova is animated in Surviving Life. |
«««1/2 Surviving Life (Theory and Practice).
Written and directed by Jan Svankmajer. Coming soon; visit the film microsite
at http://www.athanor.cz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18&Itemid=17&lang=en
Czech
animator Jan Svankmajer's bizarre
and wonderful Surviving Life (Theory and
Practice) starts with a rare thing: a director apologizing for his film.
The movie you are about to see, he explains, is a "psychoanalytic
comedy", though he grants there's not much funny about it. It was made
using a painstaking process of stop-motion animation of still photos, but not
so much for the surreal effect as because "we had no money, and it saved
us on catering for the actors." And then the skin splits off Svankmajer's skull,
and his cranium rolls off his shoulders and into a manhole.
That's how
it goes in the wide, weird world of Svankmajer (Alice, Little Otik), who
surely has one of the unique sensibilities in world cinema. After starting off
in the tradition of live puppetry in Prague, Svankmajer has gone on to produce
a body of surreal visions that have beguiled audiences and influenced such
talents as the Brothers Quay and Terry Gilliam. But where the Quays (who
disavow Svankmajer's direct inspiration) tend to be goth and ghastly, there's
always a gently whimsical element to Svankmajer's work. And where Gilliam aims
for the droll, Svankmajer seems determined to make you think as much as laugh.
His
"psychoanalytic comedy" is the story of Eugene (Vaclav Helsus), a
middle-aged office worker who is having recurring dreams about a beautiful
young lover (Klara Issova). The dreams make him feel unfaithful to his plain,
crabby wife Milada (Zuzana Kronerova), but he doesn't actually want them to
stop--he only wants to control them, to make his subconscious love affair into
a manageable thing. But Milada is on to his subconscious wanderings, and is determined
to end them any way she can.
On a visual
level, Surviving Life uses
two-dimensional "cut-out" animation to conjure up an interior world that
is both quaint and grotesque. As his shrink (Daniela Bakerova) quizzes Eugene
on the couch, portraits of Freud and Jung face off on the wall, pumping their
fists when the analysis goes in a proper Freudian or Jungian direction,
slugging each other when occasion provokes. Giant apples and orchid-vulvas and
naked women with chicken heads march through Svankmajer's dream cityscape,
which is like the London of Yellow
Submarine's "Eleanor Rigby" sequence, but stranger. Prague's
peculiar combination of baroque riches and east-bloc penury is as much a
character as the actors here, a rich compost-heap of thwarted lives and dreams
that, together, makes this something you've never quite seen before--and yet,
somehow, you suspect you have.
It is true
that under the expressionistic surface is a fairly dated understanding of
psychoanalysis, as if Svankmajer's reading on the subject ended sixty years
ago. But Svankmajer's object here is satire, not some exposition of the latest
trends in psychoanalytic theory. And
indeed, in its counter-intuitive, chaotic glory, the sardonic Life has more truth in it than the
self-serious, pseudo-profound Inception,
which envisioned the subconscious as nothing more than an elaborate
first-person shooter game. Svankmajer knows this territory better, knows it is
sticky and dangerous and more a bestiary than a computer program. There, anything
is likely to happen except what
Hollywood trades in--the expected. Surviving
Life is Inception for smart
people.
©
2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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