the m0vie blog

Surviving Life, from director Jan Svankmajer, is a strange beast. It opens with an introduction from the director, in which – using an animation style that looks like a bizarre and strangely compelling blend of Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python and South Park – he apologises to the audience for the presentation. I can’t tell if he’s being serious or not, and if his somewhat bitter complaints about his inability to find proper financing are a post-modern twist on the cliché of the misunderstood arthouse director, or a straight example of it. “Sadly, our civilisation has no time for dreams,” he claims with dour seriousness, and an uncomfortable confidence. “There’s no money in them.” Stating that he intended to produce the film as a live-action piece of cinema, he repeatedly states that this is not how he imagined the film. “So this is not a formal experiment,” he tells us, “just a poor imperfect substitute for a live action film.”It’s a shame, because the animation is the best thing about the film.

The direct approach...

Svankmajer’s work here is visually impressive. After all, it’s perfectly apt to compare the film to a feature-length version of Terry Gilliam’s crafted animations from Monty Python, which often looked like the creature had somehow cracked open his head and poured the contents of his imagination on to the screen in front of us. There’s the same sort of wonderful lack of inhibition about Svankmajer’s style here, the sense that we’re getting a look at what the inside of his head might look at, with impossible shapes and patterns and physical constructs – dog men and dancing buildings and all sorts of madness. I can’t imagine the director realising anything remotely like this in live action, no matter how much financing he managed to secure.

The rest of the movie struggles to keep up with his visuals. As fascinating as his cut-outs are, his ideas can’t seem to keep to pace. Surviving Life is a story about dreams and how they relate to reality, and how we cope with them – it contains some fascinating central concepts, but it also feels somewhat lazy. Billing itself a “psycho-analytical comedy”, it falls comfortably back on Jungian and Freudian psychology, ignoring the fact that the field has moved on quite a bit from those two figures. One of the best gags in the film has the pair framed on the wall of the lead character’s psycho-analyst’s office, watching on like a more refined (and silent) Statler and Waldorf.

The pecking order...

Of course, the lead character’s dream focuses around his mother, and leads… exactly where you might expect it to in a comedy about psycho-analysis. Of course, this is all a result of his mother “lavishing all her love on him” when he was young. “This does seem to go beyond the usual Oedipus complex,” a psycho-analyst concludes. Why is all movie psychology still Freudian? As catchy as his theories might be, most of them are still disproven, and the continued leaning on his theories by popular culture is incredibly frustrating. I just seems a little bit too simplistic.

Still, there are some nice ideas and images at play here. Indeed, Svankmajer dares to ask if his protagonist should feel guilty or ashamed for the actions of his subconscious, as he unconsciously magics away the little boy who has keeping him from his literal dream girl. Despite the fact his conscious mind had nothing to do with it, he still seems to feel guilty about it. “You think you can kill my child and get away with it?”his in-dream doppelganger demands.

Blooming fascinating animation...

Svankmajer’s film is technically impressive. He’s assembled a fine cast, who are called to emote in closely-cropped close-ups of their faces, but it’s the animation and the music that steal the show, as the film brilliantly manages to capture the wonderful off-the-wall weirdness of dreaming. In his introduction, which he claims was added due to time constraints, he state he was inspired by a dream of the first scene, and the rest of the movie was just written around that – perhaps that’s why the plotting and character development is never as fascinating as those surreal and outlandish images.

Surviving Life is opening at the Irish Film Institute on the 6th January 2012. We would like to thank them very much for providing a screener copy to review.

Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Jan Švankmajer, monty python, non-review review, Oedipus complex, review, South Park, Surviving Life, Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), Svankmajer, terry gilliam |