Conspirators of Pleasure 1996

In Prague, a city that often feels lived-in and ordinary, a strange sequence of events pulls everyday life into a dreamlike orbit of craft, whimsy, and unease. Mr. Pivoňka, Petr Meissel, is an unmarried man who quietly navigates his routine until he steps into a moment that hints at something wilder just beneath the surface. He buys pornography from his local newsagent, Kula, and then returns home with the weight of a small, secret world on his shoulders. A postwoman, Mrs. Malková, hands him a letter that simply says “On Sunday” in cut-out letters, a clue that something ritualistic or symbolic is about to unfold. In the same breath of secrecy, she rolls pieces of bread into little balls and carries them in her satchel, a tiny ritual tucked away from the daylight.

Pivoňka asks his neighbour, Mrs. Loubalová, to slaughter a chicken for him, a practical request that soon seems to intersect with more fantastical means. From the leftover feathers and papier-mâché carved from the pornography, he fashions a chicken head and creates wings out of umbrellas, a small-scale craft that feels almost like a spell. Parallel to this, police captain Weltinský begins to gather odd items—rolling pins and pan lids—from the same shop that sells the things Pivoňka uses, a quiet echo of the otherworldly purchases. Weltinský’s workshop becomes a cabinet of curiosities: stolen fur, sharp objects, and his own peculiar imagination fuse into unusual objects that seem to blur the line between tool and totem. His wife, a newsreader named Anna Weltinská, senses neglect, and she fills the days with the simple comfort of live carp. Unbeknownst to everyone, Kula harbors a private obsession with her image and has built a machine that, when she appears on television, is rigged to stroke and masturbate him, a private theater playing out in the shop window of public life.

Amid these oddities, Pivoňka and Loubalová begin to construct life-size effigies of each other, a tangible projection of their secret projects and desires. The pair live inside a web of makeshift artistry, where feathers, papier-mâché, and the breath of the unreal mingle with the ordinary rhythms of daily life. The city seems to watch, to measure, and to be drawn into these strange machines of imitation.

On Sunday, the day that has hovered in the letters and plans, Pivoňka drives to the countryside with his effigy in tow, while Loubalová carries hers to an abandoned crypt that contains a closet, a chair veiled with candles, and a basin of water—a tableau that feels both ritual and cinematic. Loubalová emerges from the closet, and her straw figure, animated by some hidden energy, responds as if it had a life of its own. Pivoňka, for his part, dons his chicken costume and parades around his own animated figure, a strange festival of weight and movement that ends with him crushing the other effigy with a heavy boulder. Loubalová, in a stark counterpoint, drowns hers in the basin. The home front follows with its own bizarre chorus: Malková, with a practiced, almost comic persistence, stuffs bread balls into her nose and ears and settles for a nap, while Weltinská, reading the news, is confronted by Kula’s machine—an intimate synchronization as he climaxes at the very moment she is engaged by the carp that she strokes and feeds, their alternating reactions echoing through the room.

As the journey continues, Pivoňka is drawn by a glimmer of Weltinská’s image in a shop window of a television store and pauses to browse electronic equipment magazines at Kula’s shop. The world of craft expands: Kula covers rolling pins with feathers, and Malková gazes longingly at a carp in a fishmonger’s window, a moment that seems to fuse desire with the oddities of the day. A grim turn arrives when Pivoňka discovers that Loubalová has been killed in her flat by a boulder that seemingly dropped through her roof; Beltinský, another figure in this mosaic of oddities, is investigating the strange events as they unfold. Returning to his own flat, Pivoňka finds the chair with candles and the basin of water waiting for him, and the closet door slowly opens, as if inviting him to step into another layer of the mystery that has quietly taken up residence in the life he has always known.

This Czech tale unfolds with a dry, almost clinical clarity that coats surreal images in a compassionate light, inviting viewers to observe a world where ordinary objects—bread, feathers, rolling pins, carp—are remade into instruments of ritual, longing, and consequence. It is a story that never vamos beyond its own premise, choosing to linger in the slippery space between the domestic and the fantastical, the public and the private, the funny and the unsettling. The result is a film that feels like a dream with the texture of a postcard you never expected to receive, a reminder that even the simplest routines may harbor doors to other, stranger rooms where every object has a hidden edge and every action echoes in unexpected ways.