Don Juan (1969)

Too much of everything

Absolutely Fantastic

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Throughout his career, Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer made a ton of creepy films...mostly shorts. Often he used stop-motion, but here in "Don Juan" he uses fake puppets to tell the story. What I mean by this is that giant wooden puppet costumes are worn by people and cords are attached to then as if they are marionettes. This allowed the folks in the weird costumes to leave the stage and run about...and run about is what Don Juan does. This version of the Don is a murderous maniac and he goes on a killing rampage when his father won't give him money...and then he murders his girlfriend's daddy! Clearly, this is NOT a nice puppet! So is this any good? Well, it certainly is creative an unique...I'll give the film that. It's also awfully weird. But it's not among the better films of the filmmaker...more a curiosity and than anything else. You do get to see a puppet bleed profusely...and I think that's a first. Overall, very strange but a bit dull and not among the filmmaker's best.

What you have here is a relatively short film that, if you are a new Svankmajer fan, will find in "The Ossuary" collection among various other gems.Don Juan (or Sanche) is not the story of that famous Spanish Casanova, but a violent, evil man and his jester sidekick. It is done with the use of man-size puppets--their strings dangling above their heads with no one holding them. It's a bit like the scene in his Faust, where Satan is summoned over and over again to his exhaustion.Not his best film, for that check out Alice, Little Otik, perhaps Lunacy... oh they're all so good. For the Svankmajer fan, you'll find an interesting, disturbing little film containing many of the delightful things that make his films so special, but in an early, raw form. Probably one of the stepping-stones he used to reach the talented heights necessary to make the greats.-JSL

Svankmajer began as a puppet master before getting into film, and this short shows both of his crafts and what he can do with them to pretty good effect. Giant puppets (I think they were actual people with puppet masks... but I'm not sure, which is one of the things I find happens to me often when watching some of Svankmajer's movies...) move in and out of stages, frames, and settings in ways that stage puppets could never do to tell a much larger story of the classic Don Juan.As for the story, it's pretty familiar and it's a pretty good adaptation. I like the humor in this short, especially with the fool. The voice acting fit the characters very well.This doesn't really stand out to me as much as Svankmajer's other movies because he usually has a much stronger immersiveness in the weird and surreal. While this short does feel so with the puppets running around like they do, the well-known story makes it feel more like a Disney adaptation than I thought Svankmajer could ever get to.--PolarisDiB

I've only seen a few episodes of South Park but this movie reminded me so much of that show that I have to believe that the SP creators were inspired by this one. First off, here you have life size puppets living in a real world whereas in South Park you have cardboard cutouts living in an animated world. The movements of the characters in both worlds are very similar. The dialogue is very South Parkish - the jester character is very similar to one or more characters in the TV show. Finally, you have lots of violence and blood in this movie. The scene where holes are poked in the puppet and streams of blood pour out is very South Parkish. This movie is also similar to Svankmajer's later work Faust.