The name in the title is Baron Munchausen, but the hero is Sally Salt.
The first we see her, Sally is painstakingly correcting posters which cover a statue in her town’s square. “Salt and Son:” her father runs a theatre troupe, and uses a non-existent son to advertise. Sally, a bit of a latch-key kid, roams through the streets, finds the posters, and defiantly scrawls “daughter” on every one.
When she confronts her distracted father, he claims only that “sons is traditional,” and that ought to be enough. When he says it, we’ve already discovered that this fictional town is embroiled in a ludicrously regulated war, where the bravest soldiers are put to death by their superiors and there’s no bombing on Wednesdays. This is the age of enlightenment, and reason decides what’s right, even when it’s absurd. Sally, anti-enlightenment and a true heir of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, only cares about what’s true, what she can see with her own eyes and know to be real.
Rationality taken to the point of absurdity is the enemy in this film, and a frightening enemy it is. Terry Gilliam is always on the side of hopeless dreamers, and of the films in his “Trilogy of Imagination,” The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is the only one in which the dreamer indisputably wins. That might have a lot to do with Sally: the film is about Munchausen, but it is her story. The baron is a hopeless dreamer, but Sally is not. She believes in the fantastical, when she can see it, but she cares about what’s true. So many times in the film, the Baron is caught up in a particular scene or memory, and it’s up to Sally to drag him back to his purpose.
It’s rather pointed that in the most frightening sequence, the journey to the moon, we are confronted explicitly with an absurd form of Cartesian dualism. The king and queen physically manifest the separation of mind and body, of reason and appetite. Their heads float in the sky, free of physical desire, while their bodies operate independently, apparently caring only for sex, food, or literally mindless aggression. The king, memorably portrayed by Robin Williams, even quotes an alternate version of Descartes’’ most famous aphorism. “Cogito ergo sum” becomes “cogito ergo est,” or “I think therefore you is,” in his words; apparently when the mind is finally free of the body, it takes on a godlike ability to define all reality as contained within itself.
It is pointed too, that when the moon king and queen’s bodies are joined, they do not achieve anything resembling a balance between body and mind. Rather, the body takes over, rendering the mind unable to do anything but follow the body’s desires. These people are not where the harmony of mind and body, of reason and sensation can be found.
Neither can that harmony be found in the Baron himself, who is a rather remote figure in the film. So many of his experiences, the ones that Sally witnesses, are decidedly physical in nature, and most of them have something to do with sex. A narrow escape from the sultan’s harem; a dalliance with the married queen of the moon; another dalliance with the similarly married Venus. These relationships are complicated and carnal in a grown-up way, and the Baron is obviously primarily motivated by his appetites: for sex, for new sensations, for new experiences. He’s fond of Sally, and of his long-suffering servants, but it’s in a distracted way; much of the time he seems to forget they’re there. It’s up to Sally and those servants to keep him focused as much as they can. It’s only they who feel obligations beyond their own pleasures.
It’s Sally who holds the balance herself, so it makes sense that she is the hero who ensures that this story (alone in the Imagination Trilogy) ends on a high note. Kevin, the young hero of Time Bandits, is abruptly shunted back to reality at the mercy of a coldly rational clockmaker god straight out of Leibniz. Sam, the doomed protagonist of Brazil, is no match for the absurdist dystopian state he tries to challenge; he ends that film tortured into madness, fully retreating into his own mind. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen ends with the Baron triumphant: he defeats the Turk and death itself, saves the town, flies away for more adventures. It’s because he has Sally, tethering him: Sally who rejects what’s traditional in favor of what’s true, and accepts the fantastical rather than the reasonable, as long as she can see it. And Sally’s father finally changes the company name to Salt and Daughter, because he finally caught up with her.
Recommend?
This is a film I love, but I understand why it was such a flop, and it’s not just to do with it being difficult. It seems like it should be a kids movie, but I can’t think of a film more likely to terrify children. That’s part of its power, maybe - I can’t think of many other films which convey the frightening parts of being a child: the powerlessness, the strange complexity of adult concerns which they either refuse to explain, or explain too much of. John Neville’s performance is excellent, but he conveys so little warmth (and I know he was capable of it. Witness the scant few minutes he’s on screen in Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women). The Baron is irritated by Sally as often as he’s nice to her. That’s another way it reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, another story about a child confronted with the vague uncertainty of the adult world.
This isn’t a kids movie, so much as it’s a movie for adults who remember what it’s like to be a weird, lonely kid who spends all of her time daydreaming. I saw it as a child and had nightmares for months; so many that for years afterwards I was convinced that the whole movie was a dream. That speaks to the effectiveness of the imagery, maybe. Watch it with your kids; it will scare them.
Clips:
I love trailers from this era. This one gives you just a glimpse of the visual style, which is breathtaking. Link.