PARIS MOVIE REPORT October 2013

[oscar jubis]

Alejandro Jodorowsky: THE DANCE OF REALITY (2013)
Think a (admittedly very offbeat) Hallmark card with a touch of Zen and design by Fellini and De Sica (with a nod to 8½) and you won't be too far off the mark. But you also won't forget this is Jodorowsky, and nobody else, making a convincing bid to be added back firmly onto the roster of the world's great living directors. It has an authenticity and purity lacking in his earlier surreal midnight cult favorites, El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), which seemed more qualified to impress and shock than to enlighten. Anyway, the brush Jodorowsky paints with as always is not the brush of Jane Austen or (God forbid) Norman Rockwell, but the brush of Fellini, Tod Browning, or Emir Kusturica -- the addition of Browning I owe to Peter Bradshaw's Cannes review.

La danza de la realidad, 130 mins., debuted at Cannes in the Directors' Fortnight series

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn introduced Jodorowski to the Cannes audience as the greatest living director and his cult following is large (close to a million followers on tweeter, by the way) and legendary. But there's also a large number of people in the global film culture (programmers, critics, etc) who think far less of him and his movies. Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, calls him a "charlatan" making "enjoyable nonsense". Here's a quote for you: "The Mel Brooks of Mexican pop surrealism, Jodorowsky always follows the premise that if you hit the audience with 30 outrageous ideas in a row, 2 or 3 are bound to work. But unlike Brooks — and closer to such poseurs as Fernando Arrabal — he has no sense of humor, much less an interesting sensibility."
I think, especially after finally catching up with this woefully neglected Danza de la Realidad, that he is misunderstood and under-appreciated. His engagement with circus culture and the grotesque comes from personal experience (careers as clown, mime, comic book artist, involvement in the movimiento panico , etc) not borrowed from Fellini or Browning. It's also very easy to forget his forays within the Mexican film industry that gave us great filmmakers such as del Toro and Arturo Ripstein (I know you're familiar with him from your reviews). They share a concern for the marginalized, the queer and the grotesque that is genuine; it comes from experience, not second hand like Woody Allen's borrowings from Bergman and Fellini.
I'm going to watch the sequel to this film soon. Have you seen it?