For those unconvinced by Bees, Sláma’s Something Like Happiness (2005; August 31, September 1-3, 7) makes for a satisfying revision. Pavel Liska is back, this time shedding his Michael Jackson poses for the ineffectual decency and melancholy of Toník, a harried loser who doggedly tries to keep the family’s commune-like farm going (at times the film feels as if it were going to turn into Dans l’année 2000, aura Jonas 25|Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000) on the outskirts of a grimy, failing industrial town. His childhood pal and unrequited love, Monika (Vilhelmová minus the cigarettes and attitude), meanwhile, wants out of her home town and plans to travel to San Francisco to reunite with her boyfriend.
Monika’s friend Dasa (Anna Geislerová) provides the spark that sets these discontents in motion, though not necessarily toward a resolution. Dasa is a Courtney Love type with two kids and a bad case of borderline personality disorder and rampant paranoia. After her married sleazebag lover, Jára (Marek Daniel, how could you!), dumps her, she falls apart, and Monika and Toník move in to take care of her two boys. Will the two find a surrogate family and true love together? Or will Toník blow himself up sabotaging a Nazi weapons shipment?
Sorry, that’s Closely Watched Trains. Anyway, you can see that the Czech movie tradition is not necessarily one of happy endings. Some Czech films are pretty much unhappy from start to finish. More than unhappy — nightmarish, infernal, nihilistic, and lots of fun.
I’m referring, of course, to Jan Svankmajer, whose pixilated stop-action animation merges the realms of the inhuman and human, the living and dead, in a surreal fusion reminiscent of David Cronenberg or Tim Burton. In short, his feature-length efforts seem sometimes overwhelming and wearisome.
He tries to take the pressure off a little at the beginning of Lunacy (2006; September 7-8) by directly addressing the audience. This film is not, he points out, a work of art. Art no longer exists, only reflections of narcissism. It’s a horror film, and if you must put a finer point on it, it draws on the motifs of Edgar Allan Poe and the subversiveness and obscenity of the Marquis de Sade. The theme? How to run an insane asylum: total suppression or utter freedom. The world, he points out, combines the worst elements of each approach.
Feel better now? Lunacy actually seems light-hearted compared with a film like Svankmajer’s truly disturbing Little Otik (2000). It calls to mind similar romps ranging from Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) to Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975). It’s also reminiscent of every other film in this program, if only because it has all the same cast members. Such as the much-abused Pavel Liska, who at this point is starting to look like the Czech equivalent of Steve Buscemi.
Liska’s Jean Berlot is a naive, virginal young man who’s introduced to us as he’s being taken away screaming by men in white coats. Actually, it’s a nightmare. He’s at an inn en route from his mother’s funeral; she died in the madhouse at Tarenton. Hence his obsessive fear about being committed to an insane asylum.
