Conspirators of Pleasure (An American's Guide to Czech Movies)
Who are you when you’re alone? According to Jan Švankmajer, you’re a lonely freak who falls in love with the pretty news anchor and accordingly builds a machine that jacks you off while you watch TV. And that’s one of the less weird bits of Conspirators of Pleasure, Jan Švankmajer’s third feature film, which can perhaps best be described as “Videodrome meets Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House but ten times weirder than that sounds.”
Conspirators of Pleasure is the culmination of everything Švankmajer did in Alice and Faust, but it’s arranged in a shape that’s bizarre even by his standards. It’s his most Surrealist film to date, but also his most plot-driven — by which I mean both that it has something resembling a story structure and that some of his characters are motivated by plot. It’s a wildly horny movie — an erotic thriller in the guise of a black comedy. Bits of it feel influenced by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but Brazil couldn’t have been made after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Conspirators of Pleasure is constructed from the rubble of the wall.
Švankmajer’s second movie after the Velvet Divorce, Conspirators of Pleasure follows the miserable personal lives of six characters in capitalist realist Prague: a lonely bachelor, his neighbor, an elderly woman with whom he has a passive aggressive feud, a newsagent who’s in love with an anchor, the anchor whose husband, a police captain, cuckolds her with his fetish for household objects, and a mailwoman who connects them in between her sessions of snorting tiny balls of bread.
Švankmajer’s consistent positioning of the household as an antisocial instrument takes on a new significance in the age of Neoliberalism Triumphant. The characters in Conspirators of Pleasure are as isolated as his previous protagonists, but instead of reckoning with their loneliness through childhood fantasy or deals with the Devil (the last friend you’ll ever make, and the last one you want to have), their escape from reality is through sexuality and pornography. They don’t experience things in solitude but in isolation — pornography in Švankmajer is an art of loneliness.
But just as crucially, it’s all media — none of the characters interact with other human beings. They merely interact with representations of each other. The bachelor and the old woman murder each other’s effigies but they never have a conversation, even when she kills and bleeds out a chicken for him. Stop-motion in this — sparser than in Švankmajer’s previous movies — embodies an approximation of motion, the reduction of all life to mere spectacle. Yes, this is the Surrealist-slash-Situationist stop-motion equivalent of a Boomer saying “Millennials, always texting” more than a decade early, but when was a Boomer ever this weird?
On some level, Conspirators is misanthropic, as Švankmajer tends to be. And his grasp on gender is terribly Czech (women exist largely in the fantasies of men, and making their decisions according to their desire to position men at the center of their lives). But there’s a fun little rebellion here. Švankmajer makes a movie without dialogue, rejecting consensus reality, and operating purely on dream logic. It’s as intimate as cinema can be: complete access to someone’s body and mind. Yes, there’s a scene where a man makes out with broom bristles and tufts of fur and runs nails over his skin. But it’s also a movie where everyone comes up with a creative way to combat loneliness. And I haven’t seen a more intimate movie where a man makes out with broom bristles and tufts of fur and runs nails over his skin.