Until now, Czech animator/director Jan Svankmajer’s icky ingenuity has been showcased best in his shorts. Although his first three features — Alice, Faust, and Conspirators of Pleasure — aren’t as disastrous as fellow animators the Brothers Quay’s Institute Benjamenta, they don’t sustain themselves as full-fledged narratives. Instead, mixing live actors with animation, they peter out into aimless repetition — as in Conspirators of Pleasure, a chronicle of complex masturbatory rituals — or arty obscurity. At 127 minutes, Little Otik eventually runs out of steam as well, but it marks the first time Svankmajer’s storytelling has matched his visual gifts.

This narrative clarity may stem from the fact that Svankmajer is adapting a Czech fairy tale, though it’s a story strange enough to have sprung from his own head. An infertile couple, Karel Horak (Jan Hartl) and his wife, Bǒzena (Veronika Zilková), would love to have a baby of their own. One day, he discovers a tree stump that resembles one. Bǒzena pretends to be pregnant, and the couple treat the stump like a real baby. After a while, their fantasy takes on a life of its own. Otik comes alive, complete with a ravenous appetite. He’s not too picky about what he eats: the family cat becomes his prey. After he begins attacking people, the Horaks try unsuccessfully to keep him under control. Meanwhile, Alzbetka (Kristina Adamcová), a little girl who lives next door, discovers Otik (recognizing him from the fairy tale) and starts offering him food out of her parents’ refrigerator. Knowing that the story ends badly for Otik, she tries to avert its inevitable conclusion.

Bǒzena’s condition is a very real one: pseudocyesis, a psychosomatic illness in which women sometimes develop the physical symptoms of pregnancy, including a swollen abdomen. (She stuffs pillows of various sizes — one for each month of the pregnancy — under her clothes to fake it.) Svankmajer takes his characters’ pain seriously, and there’s nothing absurdist about the performances by Hartl and Zilková. The weirdness around Alzbetka, including the elderly pedophile who leers at her, her (possibly related) interest in books about sexual dysfunction, and her devotion to the ever-expanding Otik (which includes using all her money to buy him food), is presented in a manner-of-fact fashion. The Horaks’ decision to fashion a child out of wood seems almost rational, an understandable response to their bodies’ betrayal of their reproductive urges.

Their magical thinking is rewarded, but the warning to beware of what you wish for sums up their problem. Once it takes on a life of its own, their "baby" makes the one in David Lynch’s Eraserhead — a clear influence on Little Otik — look cute. Like Salvador Dalí and early Lynch, Svankmajer is both fascinated and repulsed by the body’s messiness. He’s always been preoccupied by food, and here it looks absolutely disgusting. The film is filled with overhead shots of dishes that resemble vomit and grotesque images of chewing or gaping mouths.

By this point, the satire implicit in Little Otik has come to the fore, pointing out how consumerism turns biological needs into insatiable appetites, even addictions. In the wake of capitalism’s triumph in the Czech Republic, this dimension seems particularly pointed, especially once Otik begins imitating Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors by filling his gullet with people. Even so, it doesn’t explain the whole story. Apart from its fairy-tale origins, the film has plenty of literary precursors: Pinocchio, Frankenstein, the tale of the Golem. Svankmajer himself relates the anxieties of Little Otik to biotechnology. The director’s press notes state that he sees it as an "old myth retold"; he relates it to the story of Adam and Eve and curtly adds, "I think that now, after the mapping of the human genome, such myths are becoming increasingly relevant."

Still, the film wouldn’t have so much power if it were only a sci-fi cautionary tale: every child’s voracious appetite and rapid growth is implicit in Otik’s self-creation. That pushes Little Otik from surrealist black comedy into palpable horror. Svankmajer has a terrific sense of humor (no other director would show a piece of wood suckling at a real woman’s breast), but ultimately he’s not kidding around: the buttons he pushes about birth, parenthood, and neediness strike raw nerves. Santa is unlikely to deliver another holiday gift as unsettling as this.

Issue Date: December 20 - 27, 2001

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