If Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre were artificially inseminated with Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small, the inevitable product would be Juan López Moctezuma’s debut feature, The Mansion of Madness. Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” the deceptively anarchic picture not only manages to cleverly retain writer’s theses, but does so while arguably trumping the master’s original.
American journalist Arthur Hansel (Gaston LeBlanc) is sent to report upon an isolated French asylum in which New Age techniques are being employed. The mental hospital is run by one Doctor Maillard (played with masterful aplomb by Claudio Brook), whose “Soothing Method” encompasses a laissez-faire, Reductio ad Absurdum approach to curing sanity: The mad are freely permitted to humor their proclivities in the hope that their characteristic illogic will drive them to a state of crippling contradiction whereby they will be forced to accept reason. Yet all it not as it seems.
Fans of the short story will initially be disappointed with the Mexican director’s recasting of Poe’s satire whereby the writer incorporates Foucaultian, Structuralist ideology in order to examine the nature of how we come to define insanity. Poe lends his work an eerie sense of the uncanny as he subtly hints at what might well be the stunning reality behind his main character’s plight before, via his signature protocol, revealing the dreadful omen to be true just short of the tale’s curt commencement. Moctezuma dispels said apprehension midway through the feature and, thus, would appear to be arbitrarily, atop prematurely, disintegrating our anxiety. However, as the film progresses, not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s deviation from his source material in respect to The Shining, the director’s atmospheric intent is revealed to be quite separate from that of his predecessor’s. Indeed, not content to merely transcribe the famed narrative onto the screen, the auteur does nothing short of making the work his own.
By dispelling our apprehension, Moctezuma thereby shifts his tale’s focus from that of Hansel’s circumstance, largely a surreal comedy of errors, to the wider concern of the ramifications of his epiphany, as what unravels is akin to Aleister Crowley’s rendition of Cirque de soleil as shot through a Hammer lens. In so doing, Poe’s satire becomes a true nightmare. However, after the abrupt, but nonetheless essential, transition slowly settles in the viewer’s mind, we come to realize that Poe’s philosophic objectives have been ingeniously retained, if not improved upon.
In Poe’s narrative, he satirizes humanity’s political as well as social climate. Yet, Moctezuma retains these same themes as, ironically, after the inmates are disclosed as having taken over the asylum whereby they’ve made the institution’s staff their patients, we are obligated to acknowledge the fact that, upon Maillard’s utterance that the current system has been in place for several years, the inverted structure stands as testimony to its functionality after, implicitly, the previous methodology failed miserably. Thus, not only does Moctezuma second Poe’s wry critique of the period’s harsh penal attitude toward insanity (parodied in Maillard later assuming his Caligulian throne) but–much like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo–he concurrently broadens the narrative’s appraisal to include political hierarchies as well (which is reinforced by the citation that the man posing as Maillard, Raoul Fragonard, is actually an escaped criminal who sought refuge at the institution, who thereby usurped the “corrections” of, not only the latter, but the former’s bureaucratic infrastructure) as Nacho Méndez’s score highlights these motifs in his jarring juxtaposition of visual tone with excessively inappropriate, oftentimes flippant, musical accompaniment.
Not dissimilar to the equally eccentric films of Luis Buñuel (whom Brook is a frequent performer) or David Lynch, the pandemonium which fills the sanitarium is fraught with symbolic meaning at every turn, thus demanding the viewer to return to the film again and again in order to allow the chaos to permeate one’s being so as to pierce the fog of madness. Yet Moctezuma makes this extremely difficult given that we meet upon our Carrollian way a man who believes himself to be a chicken, a mock symphony, perhaps the most authentic depiction of Christ on the cross ever set to film, a battalion of Napoleonic soldiers, a makeshift Cardinal, faux sailors sans ship, a sacrificial high priestess, and a drove of tribal warriors. However, poignantly, the director’s irrefutable masterstroke occurs during the film’s resolution where, in trademark Poe fashion (which is, retrospectively, remarkably absent from the source material), Hansel’s voiceover divulges that the tale just told is that of a madman–himself. Even though the events divulged are what led the character to lose his grip upon reality, an unreliable narrator is nevertheless revealed to have been our guide and, like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, we can therefore never stake claims as to the veracity of the tale.
Though shot in Mexico with a subsidiary cast consisting primary of native actors and actresses, Juan López Moctezuma’s The Mansion of Madness was recorded in English and later dubbed in Spanish (hence the absence of a Mexican title). Befittingly, such seemingly Wonderlandian peculiarity is representative of the whole yet, like Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, makes perfect sense given the work’s agenda and premise. Not only does Alejandro Jodorowsky’s protégé admirably set a master’s work to screen, he does so while–not only making “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” his own–but improves upon the potency of the story’s already daunting prowess.
-Egregious Gurnow
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