|
"In old tradition, they speak of holy mountains..." The Thief (Horácio Salinas) descends from the cross to share a reefer with his conscious, an armless dwarf who leads him out of the junkyard into the Mexican Sodom, a tourist favorite. "Christs for Sale," a whole warehouse of them, the rape of the land enacted by El Gran Circo de Sapos y Camaleones. (Amphibians and reptiles like Aztecs and conquistadores on the maquette, until a blood tide blows it all up.) The Bible has worms on it, Alejandro Jodorowsky creates his own: He's the magus at the top of the tower, welcoming the long-haired visitor with a judo chop and a Zen pronouncement. "You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold." The free-flowing, imagist language finds a center in the rotating chamber where seekers gather, repentant capitalists laid out like tarot cards. Factories and harems get in the way of wisdom, everything is for sale ("rock 'n' roll shotguns") and nothing has value. It takes a bit of expertise to make the mechanical vagina flood (Sleeper's Orgasmatron booths are concurrent), elsewhere the Neptunian police state blurs machismo and castration in anticipation of The Road Warrior's leather barbarians. Plaster idols everywhere, you have to eat their faces off in Jodorowsky's glittering and bottomless mystical orgy. (Metaphysical doubletalk is not immune from burlesque, "together we form a dog in search of the sacred flower.") Sorcerer and charlatan and hippopotamus and alligator, in this menagerie people bleed oil, mustard, gumballs, berries and flapping birds. A criminal's enlightenment (cf. Preminger's Skidoo), sometimes it's as arduous as climbing the Lotus Island summit and at others as easy as turning back and heading home with the Magdalen and the chimp. "Our bees make honey, but your flies make shit." Jodorowsky exposes the camera to topple the temple in the punchline, cosmic and "more human than ever" and rippling on to Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry. Cinematography by Rafael Corkidi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |