Švankmajer's Surviving Life showcases stranger side of Venice 2010

As you might expect from a serious film festival, Venice 2010 has been dominated by screen dramas, with eight of the 13 movies I have seen thus far falling into that taxonomic bracket. This though does not indicate an exclusion of more exotic fare from the line-up on the Lido this year, and on Monday I took in just such a feature – Surviving Life, directed by the veteran Czech animator, Jan Švankmajer.

Perhaps best known for his feature-length interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice, it is a mild surprise to realise that Švankmajer is A) still living, breathing and putting one foot in front of another and B) is not even all that ancient (he turned 76 on the Saturday just gone), so long has he been investing life into everyday objects in his inspired, surreal animations. For me, the marionette madness of Don Juan from 1969 is his most deliriously brilliant offering, though convincing cases can be made for the merits of many of the movies produced over the course of his 40-years-plus career.

Granted an out of competition premiere at Venice, Surviving Life is the latest film drawn from the boundless imagination of Švankmajer and, reckons the Czech director, it will also be his last. However in light of the tongue-in-cheek prologue of Surviving Life, in which an animated Švankmajer addresses his audience, it is perhaps advisable to take any pronouncements from him with several lorryloads of salt.

He begins by apologising for the film we are about to watch, explaining that it had been intended as a regular live-action feature, only for there to be a budgetary shortfall which forced he and his crew to adopt a cut-out style of animation that he compares to that seen on kids' television. The technique employed sees photographs of the actors being manipulated around cut-up backdrops - aside from close-ups, which are shot live-action - and it looks not unlike the Terry Gilliam segments from Monty Python (or, for the one person reading this who might have clapped eyes upon it, the recent music video, Flush). The on-screen Švankmajer insists this approach should not be seen as a formal experiment, but rather as a “poor, imperfect substitute” for live-action.

The director goes on to categorise his flick as a “psychoanalytical comedy”, with probably the only assertion made during the course of this facetious introduction that you can actually believe being that the Czech has always wanted to make a film that deals with the melding of reality and dreams; he lamenting that the latter are something we appear to have no time for in the modern age. What most certainly should not be taken seriously is Švankmajer's suggestion that despite being a comedy, we will not find much to laugh at in Surviving Life. This, as anyone familiar with the director's work might well guess, is complete poppycock.

Although the movie grows bleaker as it winds on, apparently starting out as a tale of sexual fixation before turning into a revelatory tragedy, the early stages in particular are characterised by some decidedly coarse comedy. From the inappropriately priapic teddy bears, to a fulsome vomiting scene shot at queasy close quarters, to when the mutt-headed lackey who follows round the boss of central protagonist Eugene (Václav Helšus) begins humping a passing poodle, Švankmajer appears to relish demonstrating that even revered septuagenarian filmmakers are not above exploiting bodily functions and physical urges in the name of scoring some laughs.

The visuals are excellent, with Švankmajer's sense of invention delivering images that would take a platoon of psychotherapists years to decipher all the meanings loaded within. Appropriate enough really, given that mental analysis plays such a big part in Surviving Life (portraits of Freud and Jung hang on the wall of Eugene's shrink's office, the pair spending the movie grumbling and arguing like cantankerous pensioners).

Following the director's overture, the film proper commences with Eugene, dressed in his pyjamas, being accosted on the street by an attractive woman (Klára Issová) who has apparently mistaken him for someone she knows called Milan. He corrects her mistake but, instantly smitten, he asks her out. It is however swiftly revealed that this romantic encounter has all been a dream, and that Eugene's real life sees him married to the altogether gruffer Milada (Zuzana Kronerová) and holding down a tedious job filling out spreadsheets. Obsessed with the beauty in red - whose name he first knows as Eva, before running through Eliza and Emily, eventually settling on Eugenia – he seeks the means to control his dreams so he can share his sleeping life with her, while also trying to riddle out some of the inexplicable incongruities that manifest themselves, such as he and Eugenia both bearing matching scars on their wrists.

There are echoes of Gilliam's Brazil in the narrative of deadened office drone seeking the perfect woman who graces his dreams - which seems fitting enough given that in 2001 Gilliam named Švankmajer's 1982 Dimensions of Dialogue as one of his top ten animated films of all time. Riotous visions abound throughout, such as the psychoanalyst who strips nude to reveal a woman's body with a chicken's head atop it, though the core of the story, the relationship between Eugene and Eugenia, proves darker than first impressions indicate, with the final reel delivering a twist pitched somewhere between Hitchcock and horror movie.

Those within travelling distance of the UK capital will get the opportunity to run the rule over Surviving Life for themselves when it plays as part of the London Film Festival, in a trio of screenings scheduled for 25, 26 and 28 October.

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