Les aventures du baron de Munchausen

This is NOT a movie for everyone. This is not a movie for people who want a fantasy plot... according to the rules of fantasy movies. This is a movie which has one great ambition and has ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY, UTTERLY, FULLY, UNQUESTIONABLY fulfilled: to present the story of Baron Munchausen as the real one would have seen it. This is a great piece of visualization of the culture of 18th-century Enlightenment (did you notice that the bad guys all wore uniforms from the Napoleonic age - as a sign of when this great period of human cultural achievement finished?). It is a movie in which the sets and costumes are THE ESSENCE - the mechanical giant fish, Venus getting out of the pearl, the small amours with the pink garlands, the pinkish clouds, the two-dimensional buildings on the Moon, the separation of the head from the body, the exoticising of the "Grand Turk" - these are all correct reproductions of both the imagery from, and the topics relevant for, the Baroque period. IT IS success.