From the opening montage of explicit 17th Century porno woodcuts, Czech director Jan Svankmajer\'s Conspirators of Pleasure flags its intentions: this is a very bizarre, surreal excursion into the world of fetishism.
Constructed like a puzzle in which the pieces eventually fit together, the narratives focuses on six very, very odd individuals in Prague. Among them: the newsagent who builds an elaborate contraption attached to his TV set that pleasures him while he gazes in awe at his favourite newsreader; the bachelor who dons bat wings and a rooster head and kills an effigy of the woman next door by dropping a papier-mache rock on her head; the repulsive dominatrix who drowns her straw-man subject; the female postal worker who makes little balls of bread which she sucks into her nose through tubes; the newsreader who feeds that bread to pet fish in a tub below her desk while they suck her toes; and the masochistic cop who gets off by scrubbing his body with rolling pins covered with feathers and nails.
Is there a point to all these kinky fantasies? Perhaps, but it eludes me. Svankmajer is a widely-acclaimed animator who’s made six features including Alice (1988) and Faust (1994) and numerous shorts. This 1996 film is certainly audacious and is virtually wordless, so it plays almost like a silent movie. But figuring out who the characters are and what drives their erotic impulses is the biggest puzzle. A saving grace is Svankmajer’s clever use of animation to show how two inanimate objects met their grisly end.
The closing credits pay homage to Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel and the Marquis de Sade; I’m not sure that Freud himself would have divined much about the
psychology behind Conspirators of Pleasure.
