Petr Meissel

A life-action feature, black comedy about a group of loosely connected, ordinary people who feverishly engage in obsessive rituals: Mr Peony fashions a papier-mache rooster''s head and bat wings made ...( read more  read more... )of umbrellas; his landlady inflicts punishment on a life-size rag doll''s effigy of him; the newspaper seller reinvents his TV as an erotic toy; the postal worker turns loaves of bread into hundreds of bullet-size bread balls; and the TV newscaster keeps two live carp in a tank--to suck her toes.

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84% liked it

2,319 ratings

Critics

86% liked it

7 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 23 min.

Directed by: Jan Svankmajer

Release Date: August 22, 1997

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DVD Release Date: February 22, 2000

Stats: 113 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (113)


  • October 11, 2008
    This movie probably deserves a higher rating, but shit: this is not for me.
    It's pretty obscene in a harmless way, but come to think of it -sick as it is- there are probably people walking this earth getting of on stuff like this. I mean hey, as long as there are people that pay ...( read more)money for used socks and underwear (this is the most "civilized" example that I can come up with), this doesn't seem very far fetched.
    Anywayz, Sigmund Freud is going to have a field day with this one ;)

  • October 7, 2008
    Conspirators of a Pleasure is a film about private obsessions. The film begins observing the behavior of six people as each is in their own little world gathering and constructing their own desires. There is no dialogue to the film. The theme of the whole film is to keep us wat...( read more)ching each character's eccentric behavior build until the nature of the obsession is revealed. Showcasing even more of Jan Svankmajer's great stop-motion animation and a very weird charm.

    If everyone is a deviant, then nobody is.
    Photobucket
  • November 4, 2009
    great on surrealism point of view!
  • August 29, 2009
    Svankmajer is more interested in detailing than developing & the film feels like a stretched short movie but overall interesting & fun, I've yet to see Faust & Lunacy but Little Otik is my favourite Svankmajer so far
  • December 10, 2008
    no thanks not my kinda thing
  • June 27, 2008
    Jan Svankmajer(Alice), uses the same stop motion and puppetry techniques he has become legend for in a movie about masturbation, but containing almost no explicit sexuality. Six strangers bump into each other, exchange glances, and end up becoming th...(read more)e objects of the...( read more) others affections, which manifests in the construction(for most of the movie), of elaborate Rube Goldbergian sexual apparatus's. How do you have sex with someone who's only an image on a TV screen? It's here, as well as a straw puppet S&M scene, snorting dough, and fish toe sucking, yes that too. There's also an amazing ending, which ties all idiosyncratic strings together brilliantly merging politics, sexuality, and psychology in it's final moment and literal, climax. Like most Svankmajer stuff there's no dialog, and it's amazing the amount of ideas infused in the film only through actions, gestures, and inventions. Hard to find but well worth it. A masterpiece of sexual obsession, repression, and inter-connection. An unlikely film about comming out of the proberbial closet.
  • June 27, 2008
    Reviewed on FASCINATION CINEMA!
  • March 24, 2008
    The movie opens with decadent pictures of masturbation and bestiality, but the film itself isn't that offensive. It's often very funny, and some of the things we see are just wrong, so how could it possibly be offensive? It'd have to be bad to be offensive, and this is spectacula...( read more)r. The story itself concerns a handful of people who have a connection in one way or another -- a fat woman, who lives next door to a bearded man, who buys porn from a beady-eyed man; the mailwoman who delivers to the bearded man, and the mustached man seen by the bearded man in an antique shop. The movie is filled with deliciously gooey sexual symbolism and would make an interesting double bill with "Crash." (Though unfortunately for a film so concerned with the odd things that we see, the film itself has got that dull, brown look to it that seems common with European productions.)

    The film is dialogue free, and there's an especially good use of music and sound effects to more than make up for it (we can almost experience tactilely their sense of pleasure, the ecstasy of the mustached man who massages and prickles his wet, hairy skin with various types of bristled brushes); it's better that it's silent, because it gives a fuller feeling of the audience as voyeurs peeping in on these individuals' various sexual exploits, who create objects that satisfy their needs. There are some scenes that are just...the weirdest things I think I've ever seen, or at least certainly up there: a woman rolling up pieces of bread between her fingers and then snorting them up her nose later on in the picture. Or my favorite, the climactic scene with the bearded man dressed as a rooster, with umbrellas for wings, attacking a dummy made to look like that female neighbor. (She herself has her own dummy made in his image that she uses for S&M enactments.) But more than just surrealism -- and this is pretty surreal (meaning that it's real but bent) -- it makes a pretty powerful statement on the dullness of home life, whether you're single or paired off
  • December 12, 2007
    Ohhh que película, va de lo extraño a lo incomprensible, del morbo, alo normal que permanece oculto, para que necesitar lenguaje? para que ocultar lo desconocido que es an gratificante quien habrña de saber las conse cuencias que implica esto.

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