•
Rating: Identified the demand, found the supply.
In the early decades of the 19th century, Edinburgh was experiencing its filthy "Enlightenment", made of public executions and bustling markets; despite so much backwardness, it had truly become a meeting point for professors and students of anatomy, which made it the European capital of medicine. The engine and the fuel of this medicine are, respectively, the practice of dissection on one side and corpses on the other. Various royal acts regulate the practice of dissection, something that only a few societies in history had allowed: one of these, the Murder Act, permits the dissection of the bodies of the condemned.
The narrator who leads us into the story of Burke and Hare ("a true story, excepts for the parts that are not") is none other than the executioner, who, thanks to this act, has struck gold: he sells the bodies of the executed to the highest bidder. This, up until the Royal Academy of Surgery of Scotland, led by Professor Monroe, through a ruling of the state, obtained the supply of all the condemned bodies, killing off the market and leaving Monroe's rival, Dr. Robert Knox, "the brightest mind of his time", without the fuel needed to continue his research.
His demand is missing an adequate supply of corpses; and when the demand for a certain good surpasses the supply, an opportunity for profit emerges. You just have to wait for the right entrepreneurs to step forward.
Are the protagonists of this story such entrepreneurs?
At first glance, Burke and Hare don't seem so. They came from Ireland in search of fortune, but can’t catch a break: Hare’s married life is bogged down by alcoholism and impotence, while a scam devised by Burke is exposed by the crowd. Furthermore, the tenant of Mrs. Hare’s boarding house dies before paying his rent. Yet, what seems like yet another financial disaster could turn into an opportunity…
The link between the doctors’ affairs and those of the two Irish tricksters – as with the whole film – is represented by John Landis through a rhythmic and precise cross-cutting. Burke and Hare have the product, Dr. Knox has the money.
The rise of the two protagonists in this world is dotted with violent and macabre scenes, born from the path they've chosen. They range from the dissection of a living body to the display of a corpse devoured by worms, from the unearthing of a skeleton to the death of a hero by suffocation (the term burking, suffocation, comes from Burke), smothered "in the comfort of his own bed by his friends" Burke and Hare. Emphasizing its grotesque and crazy side are the final outcome and, above all, the words of the characters who, through the blackest humor, provide a counterpoint to the violence just described.
Just like the lines, the main characters are comic: Burke, played by the excellent Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) is the perfect foil to Hare’s jokes, played by Andy Serkis, already Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Alongside them is a succession of over-the-top, eccentric, and bizarre characters. Among them, Mrs. Hare, known for her venomous tongue, is at first a desperate, spiteful wife, then a bold treasurer and a lustful lover; Peggy is a courageous prostitute who aspires to become a theater star by staging Macbeth; Dr. Monroe performs his butchery of a medical career with nonchalance, while the professional Dr. Knox treats the supply of bodies or "fresh" corpses with equal ease.
Supporting the storyline are Scottish tunes and editing capable of masterfully weaving together the stories of these and other characters: the gears of the story are perfectly oiled.
In short, thirty years after the mad masterpiece of the Blues Brothers, Landis, relying also on a rigorous structure and surreal dialogues, still proves himself able to bring brilliant and entertaining works to the silver screen.
Loading comments slowly
