Zeman & Gilliam's Barons Munchausen (The American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

Baron Munchausen is one of the most travestied figures in history, alongside Christ, Marx, and Freud. The 18th century German baron who regaled his friends with tall tales about his battles against the Ottomans was immortalized by a fellow German conman, Rudlf Erich Raspe, who like the fictional Munchausen had to flee countries after infuriating their oligarchs. Munchausen never seemed to stop fleeing, hopping from folk tale to novel to Nietzschean treatise to silver screen. Last time I saw him, the mustached rascal had retired from his fried chicken fast food franchise to give an Oscar-nominated supporting performance in A Star Is Born.

For our purposes, we’ll first greet Baron Munchausen through our augur Karel Zeman. Munchausen is a forebearer of the Victorian adventure tradition Zeman celebrates in Journey to the Beginning of Time and Invention for Destruction. So far, Zeman has made a career out of adapting his childhood favorite books in surreal detail. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is a culmination of that streak in Zeman’s work, and one of his most enduring films.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen faithfully recreates the original tall tales of the baron. It showcases all sorts of fantastical delights, from Munchausen riding a cannonball towards its target, Cyrano de Bergerac on the moon (a phrase Gil Scott-Heron would refine a few years later), and the Baron riding a seahorse underwater. It’s not as aesthetically distinctive as Invention for Destruction (nothing is), but for sheer spectacle, it’s Zeman’s most opulent film.

But lord, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen gets tiring after a while. It has its share of delights — for one thing, it insinuates that Baron Munchausen fucked the original Mona Lisa. And there’s a delightful Jonah-esque scene in a whale’s belly that rivals Disney’s Pinocchio (a.k.a., Disney’s last good movie until The Great Mouse Detective). But the movie has even thinner writing than Invention for Destruction, and there’s an interminable sequence that wastes Rudolf Hrušinský (remember him from The Cremator?) on mind-numbing Orientalism. It doesn’t suffer from Munchausen syndrome so much as Harryhausen syndrome — glorious, mind-altering scenes of innovative special effects tenuously stitched together by an empty frame of a plot structure.

Still, the spectacle *is* extremely memorable, and Zeman left the premise of an old man lying about his past lying around for anyone to use it. Fortunately, Terry Gilliam found that idea in the days after he stopped drawing Monty Python’s brilliant animations and before he became a misanthropic crank. Out of that came The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, one of the best movies of the 1980s and a candidate for Gilliam’s best movie.

Gilliam’s movies of the 1980s form the loose “Trilogy of Imagination,” constituting Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. All three films depict outcasts combatting the oppressive authoritarian reality of their environments by embracing fantasy and madness (granted, this motif shows up in just about all of Gilliam’s movies — Brazil, Munchausen, and The Fisher King should just as easily be a trilogy). Time Bandits only tenuously holds onto this theme as its characters hop through history, while Brazil imagines a bureaucratic dystopian where a simple typo in an official document can result in the execution of a random civilian (no, insurance companies and the CIA don’t come up). Neither film ends up completely opting out of reality — Time Bandits strands its child protagonist in the end, while Brazil summarizes capitalist realism decades before Mark Fisher wrote about the topic.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, on the other hand, takes a scalpel to both authoritarian realism and feckless escapism. Gilliam is functionally making a sequel to Zeman’s film, a fact obvious by his copying and pasting of some of Zeman’s designs. The frame story of the movie depicts an unspecified European city under invasion by the Sultan. A theater troupe  in the city has its disastrous attempts to tell Munchausen’s stories thwarted by the Baron himself (played majestically by the unjustly forgotten John Neville), who emerges to set the record even less straight than it already is. Off the bat, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is making gentle fun of Zeman’s movie while also lovingly homaging it (you cannot recreate those scenes and sets without absolutely adoring the source material). Munchausen tells his stories, visualized with members of the troupe playing his old companions, clearly lying and exaggerating all the way through, as the city collapses around him because of a war he started.

This is an absolutely brutal critique of Munchausen, and on paper sounds so nihilistic that it makes Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem look like Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch. But while demonstrating Munchausen’s destructive and solipsistic romanticism, it depicts his flights of fancy as a relatively attractive alternative to the city’s modes of control. As Munchausen tells Jonathan Pryce — now playing the bureaucrats he failed to undermine in Brazil — “Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash, and I am delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.” It’s funny, but more importantly, it positions Munchausen as a militant insurgent against realism. His adventures are as fun as he thinks they are, with his encounters of Robin William as a giant moon king whose cerebral head constantly tries to free himself from his bestial, libidinous body, or of Oliver Reed as the bellicose, appropriately hawkish god Vulcan. Whether Munchausen’s tall tales are true is besides the point — they’re a much needed dose of balderdash in a shitty environment.

Granted this escapism, as wry and self-critical as it is, seems to reflect Terry Gilliam’s abdication of responsibility on set. The brilliant Sarah Polley, an extraordinary child actor, says the movie traumatized her (although she endorses its quality in practice). And the movie’s female characters don’t fare much better, as they’re exclusively trophies and sexual objects when Munchausen isn’t declaring war on Orientalist villains. Alas, Gilliam isn’t unique in that respect. But The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is utterly unparalleled. It’s just about the finest tribute to a work of Czech art ever made. If it’s lies and balderdash, I’m delighted to have something of a grasp on it.