Conspirators of Pleasure

Czech director Jan Svankmajer's surreal black comedy explores the outlandish sexual fetishes of six outwardly normal people.

Peony (Petr Meissel) indulges his passion for pornography and poultry by constructing a chicken suit (complete with a papier-mâché mask made from porn magazines), which he then uses to taunt and crush an effigy of his neighbour, Mrs. Loubalova (Gabriela Wilhelmová). She in turn is fond of secretly whipping and drowning a straw effigy of her fellow tenant.

Meanwhile, Peony's postwoman Mrs. Malkova (Barbora Hrzánová), satisfies herself by rolling pieces of bread into balls to ingest wherever she can.

Finally, the local newsagent Kula (Jirí Lábus), who provides Peony with his porn, has invented an autoerotic device to enable him to reach untold heights while watching Mrs. Beltinska (Anna Wetlinská), the nightly news anchor, whose husband (Pavel Novy) likes nothing better of an evening than to construct strange devices and scrub himself with a nail-augmented rolling pin.