Here is the film director Jan Svankmajer to tell us about the work he has just completed, and he's making excuses for it. He says they didn't have enough money so had to cut corners, with the results that instead of using actors as much as he'd like, he was forced by circumstances to use basic animation techniques, and he's essentially apologising for this and the fact that it's actually a far shorter film than he'd like, but animation does strange things to time. Once his explanations are over, we can get on with his story, which is concerned with dreaming and the effect it has over us.
Or one person in particular, and that's a chap called Eugene (Václav Helsus), a middle-aged accountant who is finding his dream life more attractive than his real one. Despite what Svankmajer said at the beginning, if he was struggling with his budget then it wasn't too detrimental to the end result as it remained recognisably his work, with its sense of humour and particular techniques marking out what couldn't belong to anyone else: even at this stage in his career, there was really nobody like him, which only made each film he created as he grew more elderly all the more precious to his fans. On the surface, mind you, you could have accused this of being Svankmajer by numbers.
But as always his inspiration made this compelling, whether you were able to grasp what he was getting at or not. Eugene starts having a dream where he meets a young woman (Klára Issová), whose name seems to change each time she appears, and she is interested in him so naturally he is flattered enough to want to see more of her. Trouble is, just when it looks like he's getting somewhere he wakes up, and his wife (Zuzana Krónerová) is telling him he was having a nightmare, which was the way the dream was going, but that didn't mean he wanted to be roused from it. Thus Eugene becomes one of the director's obsessives, determined to spend the rest of his life enjoying his sleep, neglecting everything else in the process.
The lengths he goes to in pursuit of the surreal life grow increasingly desperate, and significantly he makes regular visits to a psychiatrist (Daniela Bakerova) who appears to be encouraging his delusions, or is she helping him understand his state of mind? The style this is filmed in means that the dream world and the real one are presented in very similar ways, which could be a comment on how we see the world in general, but it does mean that no matter if Eugene is slumbering or not, we still see, for example, a man running away from a giant snake which continually eats him (sometimes it's a vacuum cleaner) or Eugene's boss's dog as a man with a dog's head, who nonetheless has sex with a poodle.
This was surrealism Svankmajer was a past master at, but as Eugene wants to prolong his fantasies he discovers more of what makes him tick, and not all of it is he comfortable with. The psychiatrist is forever coming up with explanations for his thoughts, with various complexes and fixations which eventually describe his dream woman as his mother, and the kid he has seen with her as himself, making him his own father should he pursue the relationship. This is satirical of sorts, at once revelling in psychology and offering it up as worth making fun of, as if reducing anyone to a collection of explicable quirks and complexes is needlessly simplistic, then acknowledging there's a lot more to people and their minds which you would expect. By the end of a story which has taken in fears of adultery, fatherhood and suicide, there's a curious poignancy to the way Eugene has been left lost in a sea of neuroses, as if the very act of delving into your psyche is a minefield. Music by Aleksandr Glazunov and Jan Kalinov.
