While on his way home from his mother's funeral, a timid young man, struggling with mental illness, is offered a ride by an eccentric marquis who allows him a place to stay. After the visitor witnesses the accommodating nobleman performing a strange blasphemous ritual involving nude women, nails and chocolate cake (?), he is duped into playing out an intricate therapy regimen with the man's mute servant. The reasoning behind this is based in the marquis' own battle with insanity, which leads the two men to explore a sanitarium where the unorthodox recourse in treatment is total freedom...
Needless to say, "Lunacy" is quite an odd film, but still works on pretty much every level. The main objective basically boils down to the question of how mental illness is treated using the two most 'extreme' fundamentals of the healing spectrum: free will or physical torture. It all plays out incredibly well, as far as the pacing and story structure goes. Definitely a bit of a departure from many of the other Svankmajer works I have seen, in terms of it being pretty dialog heavy and not all that dependent on his unique style of stop-motion animation - though there ARE intercut moments of chunks of raw meat scurrying around (something not uncommon for one of his films), but these act more as transitional scenes as opposed to playing a big integral part in the story. At least, that's how it appeared to me since I have no idea what their significance was.
It's safe to say that "Lunacy" is one of Svankmajer's most 'absorbing' films, though I'd also recommend his more 'visual' films, like "Little Otik" and "Conspirators of Pleasure", especially for those unfamiliar with his style.
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