Club of the Laid Off (1989)

Undescribable Perfection

Did you people see the same film I saw?

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

In keeping with the common style of Czech stop motion animation, "Klub odložených" ("The Club of the Laid Off" in English) has inanimate objects doing a series of weird things. In this case, the objects are mannequins. A bunch of old discarded ones spend their days traipsing around a Prague apartment, but some people dump a bunch of new discarded mannequins in the apartment. How are the two sets of mannequins supposed to get along? Since this is only the second Jiří Barta movie that I've seen, it's not fair to judge it against his entire repertoire; I did like "A Ballad about Green Wood" better, but this one's still OK. Nothing special, but certainly creative.

To some, the stop-motion films of Czech artists Jan Svankmajer and Jirí Barta (a bit later) are absolutely adored. I have now seen about eight or ten and frankly, I've seen enough as after a while they become repetitive. All the films I've seen of theirs involved discarded things and bits and knickknacks all being animated--and usually in very bizarre and disarming situations. It might be okay to see a few, but after a while most people will no doubt tire of them.Well, this film is no different. It consists of a beat up looking flat where it is inhabited by a variety of very old fashioned mannequins. All of them are animated using stop-motion and their behaviors, not surprisingly, are bizarre and disturbing. Later, a group of newer mannequins are brought in by real people and the two groups (old and new) fight it out amongst themselves after the people leave.While I must admit that the animation style is impressive and took a lot of work, after a while I was left thinking "so what?". Sure, I am seeing a lot of trash move about and gyrate but none of it makes any sense. And, I quickly tired of it.My advice is to try watching a few films like this...then stop!! Unless you are strangely fixed on this style, try Svankmeyer's JABBERWOCKY (which bears no resemblance to the Lewis Carroll poem) and perhaps ALICE (a VERY twisted and highly disturbing retelling of "Alice in Wonderland") and then stop. Give your poor brain a rest!!By the way, this strange short can be found in a DVD collection entitled "Cartoon Noir". It's a collection of strange avant garde films that really have nothing to do with Film Noir and would probably not be appreciated by most viewers.

Well, uh, gee, can you say "social commentary" here? Jiri Barta, by gift of being Czech and being an animator, is often compared to Jan Svankmajer, but if anything this short film underlies their differences more than their similarities.The film is split, sort of, into two movements. The first is simply a detailing of the day in the life of rejected mannequins, as they repetitively go about their business day after day after day like automatons. The second half is when their life gets invaded by much more up-to-date, but still rejected mannequins who first displace them, and then fight them, and then become a part of their lives as well.In the 1980s Czechoslovakia switched from a socialist nation to a consumer capitalist one, and most of Barta's work deals with that exchange. This is probably his most blunt. The lives that the mannequins live before the invasion of the commercial is dreary, dull, dusty, broken, and even downright sinister in some regards. However, the capitalist life isn't much better as its full of distractions, drug abuse, and addiction. Both are filled with seedy sex. And in the end, the differences aren't worth comparing, because the only one who wins is the television.--PolarisDiB