WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Leofwine_draca My second Svankmajer film, following on from SURVIVING LIFE (which I hated). This one's a lot more fun, a truly surrealist movie that explores the world of the sexual fetish, without actually involving the sex act too much. So we get a story involving a bunch of crazy people who are turned on by bread balls, by brushes, and plenty more besides.It's a truly outlandish film made by a crazed but great mind, and it hangs together surprisingly well for a movie containing no dialogue. The various narratives tie together well, making no sense at the outset but gradually coming together for a breathtaking climax. The level of imagination is through the roof, and there are tons of great visual images here; it gets particularly good when the stop motion comes into it.A film not for all tastes perhaps, but a rewarding experience for those with open minds all the same.

skepticus Hard to give anything less than a 10 to Svankmajer's works, so I'll just echo the already.But I do want to make special mention of his 2D inclusion, in this film, of Julia Hayes. If you know of her, you'll be both pleased and disturbed by her appearance. It is from one of her best spreads, Hustler magazine.Of course, I doubt very much that she even knows about this, being an ex- stripper/dancer/model/nightclub owner in North Carolina (last I knew about).So, if anyone here has any line to her, let her know.

Prokievitch Bazarov To describe Jan Svankmajer's film ''Conspirators of Pleasure'' as a live-action cartoon is a little like calling James Joyce's ''Ulysses'' a salty Irish yarn. One of the world's most renowned animators, Mr. Svankmajer, a Czech, is a surrealist visionary whose movies featuring clay figures, marionettes, dolls and eerily life-infused everyday objects have the intensity of fiendishly witty nightmares. ''Conspirators of Pleasure,'' his mostly silent, third feature film, explores the secret erotic fantasies of a group of ordinary Prague residents whose paths are continually crossing. Although it has its quotient of dolls and mannequins, it features six actors whom the director manipulates like animated characters. As they go about their daily routines, they furtively accumulate a bizarre assortment of items that they use to act out elaborately kinky autoerotic rites. Mr. Peony (Peter Meissel), a mild-mannered bachelor, asks his next-door neighbor Mrs. Loubalova (Gabriela Wilhelmova) to slaughter a chicken for him. After using the carcass as a model to construct a papier-mache rooster's head from torn-up pornographic photos, he glues on the chicken feathers and fashions bat wings out of cut-up umbrellas. Donning the rooster head, into which he has carved eye holes, and strapping on the bat wings, he metamorphoses into a ludicrous predatory bird that murders a life-size effigy of the woman next door by levitating and dropping a papier- mache rock onto her head. Mrs. Loubalova harbors a similarly homicidal lust for Mr. Peony. In a quasi-religious ceremony conducted in a candlelit crypt, she first whips, then drowns his effigy by repeatedly dunking its head into a basin. The solo rituals of four other obsessive fantasists are interwoven with those of Mr. Peony and Mrs. Loubalova. Mrs. Malkova (Barbora Hrzanova), the neighborhood mail deliverer, shreds the insides of a loaf of bread into round little balls that she voraciously sucks into her nose through tubes. Mr. Kula (Jiri Labus), the newspaper vendor from whom Mr. Peony buys his girlie magazines, constructs a Rube Goldberg-like contraption attached to his television set that massages him when his favorite news announcer, Mrs. Beltinska (Anna Wetlinska), delivers the nightly news. While he ardently kisses the screen on which she appears, she achieves orgasmic bliss by having her toes sucked by two pet fish concealed under her desk in a tub. Meanwhile, her husband, the police commissioner (Pavel Novy), sneaks off to indulge in his own masochistic rite, vigorously scrubbing his body with rolling pins covered with feathers and nails. ''Conspirators of Pleasure,'' whose final credits acknowledge inspirations that include Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Luis Bunuel and the Marquis de Sade, is seriously funny and cheekily subversive. In having its six characters be ordinary people with extraordinary fantasies, the film portrays the erotic impulse of everyday life as a wild, chaotic, antisocial force that lends people their sense of individuality. But Mr. Svankmajer's vision is much more than a surrealistic rendering of standard Freudian notions of repression and sublimation. Encountering one another through the day, these obsessive ritualists exchange the sly, knowing glances of conspirators in a political plot. Not only do they recognize one another as ''freaks,'' to use contemporary parlance, but their unquenchable perversity also unites them in a shared resistance to the puritanical conformism of Eastern European culture (or at least that culture before the fall of Communism). Their pleasure-seeking also involves covert collaboration. For example, the bread balls that Mrs. Malkova sucks into her nostrils feed the fish that nibble on Mrs. Beltinska's toes. The technique of the film is as sly as its characters. At first you have no idea why these people are accumulating such an odd assortment of items. As the pace quickens, the film coaxes the viewer into becoming a voyeur and tacit collaborator in these pseudo-pornographic scenarios. Ultimately, a real crime is committed that eerily mirrors the zany erotic games that have come before. Having celebrated its characters' erotic fantasies, the movie reminds us that the line separating kinky fantasies from heinous real-life crimes can be awfully thin.

EVOL666 Having seen Svankmajer's LITTLE OTIK, ALICE, and a few assorted short-films, and reading a brief synopsis of this film - I had a bit of an idea what I was getting into with CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE. An interesting director for those unfamiliar with his work, but I'm always left a bit cold and unfulfilled with his works...A group of six more-or-less tenuously linked individuals are introduced - each with intricate and bizarre fetishistic tendencies. One man dresses up like a chicken and enacts a fantasy of murdering his female neighbor. His neighbor enjoys S&M games with a life-size stuffed doll. Another man builds a sex-robot because of his obsession with a female television personality. A female postal-worker is enthralled with rolling up little balls of dough and snorting them. A disenfranchised husband enjoys to create strange sensory "toys" out of fur and other materials to arouse himself - and his wife has a thing for fish. Eventually the connection between these individuals is revealed, and they find that their singular fetishes may not be as "singular" as they seem...A relatively entertaining and often funny/quirky film about desire and shame - CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE is worth a look to serious art-house style film fans. There is no dialogue in the film - but the goings on are often strange enough to keep things "interesting" - and the narrative of the film is pretty clear by the end. Personally - I'm just not a big fan of this sort of thing. Though many of the scenarios portrayed were interesting or amusing, I found myself bored after awhile and wishing for a hastier conclusion. The ending ties things up well, so no real gripes there either - I think my relatively mediocre rating is more just a matter of my own personal taste. I can see why some love this sort of thing, and others hate it - I'm more on the fence. Definitely worth a look for surreal-film lovers, or those that have seen some of Svankmajer's other works and really enjoyed them...6/10