Saturday, August 30, 2008

Conspirators of Pleasure (movie review)

This is one of those avant-garde Czechoslovakian classics you won't get to see unless you live near one of those hard to find video places, or have superb dial-up access of the type hardly anyone has (yet). It's right up there with The Holy Mountain on the weird scale.

It won't really spoil it to say the animation is sparse, mostly live action, with each of the characters in a solipsistic pursuit of pleasure, but in ways that actually depend on, leverage, one another's complicity, i.e. they're all in this together, and it looks like hard work.

For example, one of the guys is in love with this news anchor, and the timing of their affair is apropos each of them, apparently broadcast for the world to see (in her case), but each is quasi-alone.

She's got this foot fetish involving fish fed with bread balls, which have been pre-filled with dreams by the delivery woman, who knows the guy with the chicken fixation, umbrella wings sewn in the scary lady's apartment across the hall and so on (I'm leaving out some of the key puzzle pieces, so as not to spoil it for you).

The viewer / voyeur does not stay unimplicated, i.e. if you enjoy movies like this, you'll probably fit right in, as in "welcome to Czeckoslovakia!".