Conspirators of Pleasure

Conspirators of Pleasure has no dialogue, but each of its characters has his or her own unique form of private sexual self-expression, usually involving homemade autoerotic gizmos. A shopkeeper enjoys being caressed by robot arms while watching his favorite TV news anchorwoman. She likes having her toes sucked by fish. Her husband mortifies his flesh with devices that rotate feathers, bristles, and nails. A woman tortures an effigy of her neighbor; he does the same to her effigy while he's dressed as a chicken. All are served by a postal deliverywoman who rolls chunks of bread into dense pills and stuffs them into her nose and ears. These six cross paths without realizing that each is a member of this furtive fraternity of fetishists.

Czech director Jan Svankmajer, best known for his stop-motion animated shorts and his surreal updates of Alice in Wonderland and Faust, takes his view of the human body as an arbitrary and malleable social construct (Kafka by way of David Cronenberg) into Buñuel territory. His cheerful, inventive satire on bourgeois sexual morality (if everyone is a deviant, then no one is, and no one need be ashamed) looks at all the creativity and hard work that goes into self-gratification and dares to call it art. At the Brattle Theatre this Friday and Saturday, January 30 and 31.

-- Gary Susman