The
psychedelic cinema of the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky has proved
weirdly enduring. From 1970’s El Topo
and 1973’s The Holy Mountain onwards,
the struggles of these films’ outsider-heroes have resonated across time: first
with those turning on, tuning in and dropping out, then with the marginally
more sober Midnight Movie crowd, then again with viewers of 1990s TV clipshows,
which used this oeuvre to illustrate what was missing from our increasingly corporate
cinemascape. 1989’s Santa Sangre is
Jodorowsky’s Freudian circus movie – the missing link between Tod Browning’s Freaks and the HBO series Carnivàle – which, for all its
perversity, clings keenly, even touchingly, to a notion of innocence.
It’s
a film of two halves, in every respect. In the first, our young hero Fenix
(Adan Jodorowsky, the director’s youngest) has a maddeningly macho idea of what
it is to be a man driven into him by his father, a knifethrower who –
unbeknownst to his devout wife – has been pointing all his weapons at the Circo
de Gringo’s resident tattooed lady; the consequences of this affair will see
Fenix removed to an asylum, and separated from the one girl who really loves
him. The second half sees Fenix (now played by older son Axel) rise again, only
to swing too far the other way in attaching himself to his (newly armless)
mother’s apron strings.
You
can instantly spot why it’s become such a fixture in the cinematic
counterculture: consider it Philip Larkin’s ageless warning of what your
parents do, expressed in more colourful terms yet. As an experience, Santa Sangre is still thrillingly wild,
if not unhinged; like its protagonist, it lurches between feminine tenderness
and something more fervidly male. The early jawdropper is the
once-seen-never-forgotten sequence depicting an elephant’s death: after
belching blood from its trunk, the poor creature receives a solemnly lavish
burial before the locals descend en masse to carve up the carcass.
It’s
wildly long at two hours, yet Jodorowsky keeps generating extraordinary moments
and memories, ideas and images. You gawp as armed police, sent in to crush a
protest, are momentarily repelled by bandoleros;
you gulp down the pre-von Trier transgressive thrill of seeing a director letting
loose actors with Down’s syndrome on cocaine and hookers, ahead of the rather
more traditional delights of a main-street musical number; you goggle at the
women whose hips and glutes put Shakira to shame.
Elsewhere,
some of the greatest knife business since Psycho
– itself, of course, a warning of the dangers posed by mother’s boys – is only
topped by the final-reel sight of our hero literally pulling a python from his
pants. Jodorowsky was drunk on the symbolic possibilities of cinema, but he was
alert to the pleasures that can follow from taking such frenzied swings and
stabs in the dark. Santa Sangre
probably isn’t something you’d choose to show in the church hall – unless your
vicar was especially broadminded – but it is absolutely a vision, and one that
remains every bit as far-out as it ever was.
Santa Sangre opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD re-release on November 5.
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