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Conspirators of Pleasure
Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage and masturbate him. One of his customers makes an elaborate chicken costume for a voodoo-like scene with a doll resembling his plump neighbor. She, in turn, has a doll that resembles him, which she whips and dominates in an abandoned church. The TV news reader has her own fantasy involving carp. Her husband, who is indifferent to her, steals materials to fashion elaborate artifacts that he rubs, scrapes and rolls across his body.
| Release : | 1996 |
| Rating : | 7.3 |
| Studio : | ATHANOR, Delfilm, Cominici, |
| Crew : | Art Direction, Art Direction, |
| Cast : | Petr Meissel Gabriela Wilhelmová Barbora Hrzánová Pavel Nový Jiří Lábus |
| Genre : | Animation Drama Comedy |
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Reviews
Powerful
In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes
It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...
Only Jan vankmajer would be able to make a film like this.Pretty much like his other works, "Conspirators of Pleasure" is a fascinating movie with many elements from surrealism, which combines perfectly well some creepy stop-motion animation with some (even more) bizarre elements, resulting in a dark and unusual comedy where the pleasure is often associated with the uncomfortableness and guilt.Conspirators of Pleasure is a brilliant set of Freudian tales: We don't rule our desires, our desires rule us. It is a brief, but totally worth-watching experience with can be compared with anything that I've seen before.
Hard to give anything less than a 10 to Svankmajer's works, so I'll just echo the already.But I do want to make special mention of his 2D inclusion, in this film, of Julia Hayes. If you know of her, you'll be both pleased and disturbed by her appearance. It is from one of her best spreads, Hustler magazine.Of course, I doubt very much that she even knows about this, being an ex- stripper/dancer/model/nightclub owner in North Carolina (last I knew about).So, if anyone here has any line to her, let her know.
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
One-word summary: Masterpiece. This one keeps me mesmerized every frame for the whole 80 minutes. Surrealistic, fantastic, bizarre, fetishistic, fascinating, it is Jan Svankmajer's finest excursion into animania. Why this work, and this artist, toil in relative obscurity is beyond me. (Makes me wonder what *else* out there is this good but this hard to discover.) It is a guilty pleasure, indeed, to watch this, but as a work of cinema, it is wonderful. (The subject matter is quite incidental, really; my mind could easily be massaged for 80 minutes like this with just about anything Svank could concoct.) I daresay it's in or near my top 10 favorites, but it isn't supposed to be...
