This may very well be Jan Svankmajer's best movie ever. I like Alice, I like Faust, I like Lunacy, I like all of his shorts I've seen, but this one doesn't feel nearly as uneven and directionless as his movies can sometimes tend to be, though it does go through quite a few levels of narrative over it's entire playlength.
It starts out as something of a farce as a young sterile couple get so obsessed with fetishizing children.... that they literally make a child out of a fetish. The short amount of lying and letting their imagination take over later, and the fetish comes to life--with some interesting results. First of all, it has a nearly insatiable appetite. Secondly, it keeps growing bigger. Thirdly and more importantly, it doesn't differentiate between "people food" and "people as food." This is about when characters start disappearing...
It's hilarious, freaky, and eventually becomes children's fairy tale with a self-reflexive ending. Svankmajer takes his fascination with gluttony and his love of animating meat a little further and more completely adheres it to a direct theme. Pieces of his short films appear as television ads, and his surrealist tendencies get some fun as men imagine babies coming out of foodstuffs and foodstuffs hiding familial dysfunction.
As I said, I'm a fan of Jan Svankmajer, but he's always been one of those directors that I don't quite know how to introduce to people. I think many should start here. It's not as broadly fragmented as some of his longer narratives, and it's not as idiosyncratic as his short films. It showcases pretty much every aspect of his auteurship (food, meat, stop-motion, puppetry, sex, childlore, obsession, wood, genitalia), but doesn't rely on familiarity with his work to operate (as I feel Faust does entirely too much).
--PolarisDiB
It starts out as something of a farce as a young sterile couple get so obsessed with fetishizing children.... that they literally make a child out of a fetish. The short amount of lying and letting their imagination take over later, and the fetish comes to life--with some interesting results. First of all, it has a nearly insatiable appetite. Secondly, it keeps growing bigger. Thirdly and more importantly, it doesn't differentiate between "people food" and "people as food." This is about when characters start disappearing...
It's hilarious, freaky, and eventually becomes children's fairy tale with a self-reflexive ending. Svankmajer takes his fascination with gluttony and his love of animating meat a little further and more completely adheres it to a direct theme. Pieces of his short films appear as television ads, and his surrealist tendencies get some fun as men imagine babies coming out of foodstuffs and foodstuffs hiding familial dysfunction.
As I said, I'm a fan of Jan Svankmajer, but he's always been one of those directors that I don't quite know how to introduce to people. I think many should start here. It's not as broadly fragmented as some of his longer narratives, and it's not as idiosyncratic as his short films. It showcases pretty much every aspect of his auteurship (food, meat, stop-motion, puppetry, sex, childlore, obsession, wood, genitalia), but doesn't rely on familiarity with his work to operate (as I feel Faust does entirely too much).
--PolarisDiB