Surviving Life – review

Jan Švankmajer’s animated comic fantasy is a film that might remind you of the Woody Allen joke about sex. Is it dirty? Only if you’re doing it right. This combines live action and animated cutouts, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam. A married middle-aged man has an affair, in his dreams, with a beautiful young mistress; he causes a psychic crisis, and virtually a rip in the reality-dream time-space continuum, by getting this dream-mistress pregnant. He periodically visits an aghast psychoanalyst, on whose study walls are rather unfunny pictures of Freud and Jung, appearing to gasp or heckle or quarrel. But the film interestingly and subversively takes its stand on the idea that dreams are the real thing; waking life is an exotic, strange tissue of unreal diversions.