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Enlightenment is blinding, says Alejandro Jodorowsky, mole and gunslinger alike find out in a lysergic reshuffling of Old and New Testament. The auteur astride a horse with naked son in tow is more Charles Manson than Clint Eastwood, the village massacre they ride through adds grisly crimson to the palette of sandy yellow and celestial cobalt. Cackling fetishists guard the effete despot responsible, all fall before the avenger who growls out his identity when asked, "soy Dios." Four Gun Masters in the spiraling wasteland, the perfidious maiden encourages cheating and is scooped up by a whip-cracking dominatrix. "Genesis" and "Prophets," a journey studded with tin gods and bestial groans. "The deeper you fall, the higher you'll get." Artaud by way of Corbucci, or rather an exploitation Parajanov, just Jodorowsky cramming everything in his churning psyche into a barbarous slab of cinema. Franciscan monks daintily painted, phallic rocks ejaculating water, butterfly nets for catching bullets—a deranged imagistic procession to rupture the Western into metaphysical shards. "The heart, and the head. Swap them." Crucifixion out of a pistol, "a very delicate shot." Humility following egomania is a cut-rate pantomime act, thus the scraggly shootist turned shorn monk in a sagebrush Second Coming, "Psalms" for the misshapen underclass. Sodom-America is quite the circus: Lascivious hags in the Legion of Decency, Russian roulette at the congregation, branded slaves at the rodeo, all under the mighty dollar's pyramidal peeper. The counterculture's shock-jock magus, Jodorowsky pulls out the stops for his "Apocalypse," a squib fiesta with an immolation to cap his extravagant private mythology. Dwarf bride and estranged scion form the new family, "demasiada perfección es un error." Only madness can match madness, Boorman in Zardoz gives it a valiant try. With Mara Lorenzio, Brontis Jodorowsky, Alfonso Arau, David Silva, and Paula Romo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |