Mark Kermode's film of the weekDrama filmsReviewThe octogenarian director Alejandro Jodorowsky relives his troubled childhood in 1930s Chile in a film of carnivalesque exuberance
The Chilean visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first feature since 1990’s disappointing The Rainbow Thief is a fantastical quasi-autobiographical romp in the manner of Fellini’s Amarcord, or perhaps Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. Adapted from Jodorowsky’s novel La Danza de la Realidad (with elements of El Niño del Jueves Negro), this is warmer than many of the director’s most revered works, yet not in the least constrained by its intimacy and affection. On the contrary, the phantasmagorial zest that first made El Topo and The Holy Mountain midnight-movie fixtures is very much to the fore, albeit tempered by a sense of resolution and resolve – the anarchic tranquillity of age.
The setting is the director’s home town of Tocopilla, a remote Chilean enclave in which he grew up as “the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in the middle of a land purchased from Bolivia and peopled with Amerindians”. The octogenarian film-maker appears as a spirit guide, leading his younger self (Jeremias Herskovits) through the emotional minefield of a surreal childhood torn between politics and religion, suffering and pleasure.
In fittingly Freudian fashion, Alejandro’s son Brontis Jodorowsky plays his father, Jaime, a stalwart comrade who “dresses like Stalin” and despises the “girlish mane” his child affects. By contrast, his mother, Sara (Pamela Flores), delights in the boy’s ethereal beauty and instils in him a sense of wonder at the sublime weirdness of his surroundings.
Jaime speaks only of a godless world in which “you die, you rot – there’s nothing beyond”, and pisses on the radio in defiance; Sara sings with fleshy passion and urinates healing waters, her strange magic lusty and mysterious. Together, they run the Casa Ukrania, a haberdashery and lingerie store wherein fondled stockings ignite his furtive passions while she provides miraculous refuge from a variety of plagues – social, medical, spiritual.
As the young Alejandro confronts mortality and metaphysics, Jaime heads off to commit a Love and Death-style assassination, a wish-fulfilment fantasy beset by Woody Allen-esque dithering that symbolically paralyses his trigger finger – and more. The framework may be sociopolitical (nazism is on the rise, testicular torture on display) and the opening ode economic (“Money is like blood… There is no difference between death and wealth”) but the visual palette is carnivalesque. This is a circus of amplified bosoms and diminutive sideshow attractions, a fiesta of biblical waves, dead fish and masked costumery in which an early nod to Hitchcock’s The Birds perfectly sets the playful psycho-sexual tone (Ken Russell would have loved this movie!).
Dancing to a musical pulse that would make the Serbian film-maker Emir Kusturica weep (part oompah, part opera, all unabashed overstatement), Jodorowsky’s dreamy reminiscences rise and fall in a seascape of arresting tableaux: a black-clad crowd trekking with umbrellas across a barren landscape in search of water; a tyrant writhing in orgasmic ecstasy as he bounces upon a white steed; a young boy painted from head to toe with shoe polish to embrace and defeat his fear of the dark; a joyous church congregation waving chairs in the air as they jump and sing “How great thou art” while a carpenter dies before their lowly altar.
Jodorowsky describes the film as being “like a mental atomic bomb”, but its powers are constructive rather than destructive. This is the work of someone coming to terms with their past, transmuting the traumas of childhood into the building blocks of adult awareness. If it sometimes feels like a group therapy session, then so be it – Jodorowsky has earned the right to be at peace with his back catalogue, cinematic or experiential, real or imagined.
The fact that it’s taken La Danza de la Realidad a couple of years to make it into UK cinemas (it played at Cannes back in 2013) suggests that it’s unlikely to earn armies of new fans. But for those who have revered Jodorowsky since the days of Fando and Lis, and who are now eagerly awaiting the forthcoming Endless Poetry, this exuberant later-life work proves that his creative wellspring has far from run dry.
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