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MOVIES | MOVIE REVIEW

Family Memoir in a Dreamscape‘The Dance of Reality,’ Jodorowsky’s Comeback Film

NYT Critics' Pick

By A. O. SCOTT MAY 22, 2014

The Chilean-born filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has recently been the

subject of a revelatory documentary — “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” directed by

Frank Pavich — about a movie he never made. There are a lot of those:

Since his heyday in the early ’70s as a midnight cult-film pioneer with “El

Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” Mr. Jodorowsky’s semimythic status as a

cinematic wild man has outstripped his productivity as a director. So the

arrival of a new feature — his first since 1990 — would be grounds for

excitement even, if the movie in question, “The Dance of Reality,” were not

something very close to a masterpiece.

You do not have to be a devotee of this director’s earlier work to think

so, since “The Dance of Reality” serves both as a capstone and a calling

card. Mr. Jodorowsky’s reputation for extremity and surrealist

inventiveness is upheld by grotesque, horrifying and comical images that

seek out zones of maximum sexual, social and political sensitivity. A

woman urinates on her semiconscious husband (in a scene that could not

possibly have been simulated). Later, she dances naked with her young son

after blackening his body with shoe polish. Her husband fights in the

street with a group of shirtless, homeless men, most of them missing at

least one limb. There are scenes of torture, sexual violence and almost

unbearable embarrassment.

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And yet, somehow, the mood is more tender than assaultive. Mr.

Jodorowsky’s dominant trait seems to be an exuberant sense of wonder

rather than a desire to serve up gratuitous shocks. He shows up on screen

early, a tall, charismatic, silver-bearded gentleman with a fondness for

quasi-mystical aphorisms about money, desire and memory. You may roll

your eyes at some of them, but those same eyes will be dazzled by bold

colors and seduced by sweeping, sinuous camera movements. You will also

be drawn into an eccentric and lovely coming-of-age story, an evocation of

the lost landscapes and vividly recalled sensations of childhood that

belongs in the company of films like Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord” and

John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory.”

Mr. Jodorowsky was born in 1929, which is the year his tale begins,

with a young adolescent boy, also named Alejandro Jodorowsky, living

with his shopkeeper parents in the Chilean seaside town of Tocopilla. Chile

is enduring the dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, whose imposing

portrait adorns nearly every wall in Tocopilla. Alejandro’s father, Jaime

(played by Mr. Jodorowsky’s son Brontis), a Jewish immigrant from

Ukraine, has a picture of Stalin hanging in his store, and the three-way

resemblance among these mustachioed tyrants, political and domestic, is

hardly accidental. Ibáñez is rounding up opponents, while Stalin is

starving peasants in the Jodorowskys’ homeland. On the home front,

Jaime is a macho martinet who subjects his son to a series of cruel and

capricious humiliations, hoping to make a man out of him.

The boy’s mother, Sara (Pamela Flores), is not much easier to deal

with. She withdraws her maternal love after Jaime forces the boy to cut off

his flowing blond locks and confounds poor Alejandro by alternating chilly

reserve with erotic provocation. She also sings all of her dialogue in a

soaring soprano, as if her every utterance were an aria in her own private

opera. (Ms. Flores, in addition to being a fearless screen actress, is also a

professional opera singer.)

That is hardly the most peculiar thing in “The Dance of Reality,” but a

simple catalog of oddities would misrepresent the beauty and coherence of

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the film’s conception, as well as spoiling some surprises. Its blend of visual

elegance and perversity recalls the work of Luis Buñuel, and also of Mr.

Jodorowsky’s countryman Raúl Ruiz. The streets of Tocopilla are touched

with some of the magic realism that animated Gabriel García Márquez’s

Macondo on the other side of the continent, and also with a tragic sense of

history.

But the sensibility governing this film is as entirely and unmistakably

Mr. Jodorowsky’s as the experiences, dreamed and lived, that feed it. It is

as much his father’s tale as his own, and though it is unsparing in its

depiction of Jaime’s cruelty, vanity and cowardice, it is also profoundly

forgiving. And implicitly political in its fury, undimmed by the passage of

years, at violence inflicted by the powerful on the weak. Jaime is a bully to

his son, but circumstances conspire to teach him a lesson. After Jaime

leaves home on an ill-fated mission to assassinate Ibáñez, he suffers a

series of physical and spiritual torments that both break and redeem him

and that give the movie extraordinary moral force and emotional power.

Mr. Jodorowsky, whose noncinematic pursuits include the

development of a therapeutic method called psychomagic, is a shamanistic

presence in “The Dance of Reality.” He appears as the protector of his

younger self and as a kind of tutelary deity, infusing the story of his own

life with a potent and implicitly political lesson. “The Dance of Reality” is

the work of a highly disciplined anarchist, whose principal weapon against

authority is his own imagination.

The Dance of Reality

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky; director of photography, Jean-MarieDreujou; edited by Maryline Monthieux; music by Adan Jodorowsky; costumes by PascaleMontandon-Jodorowsky; produced by Michel Seydoux, Moises Cosio and AlejandroJodorowsky; released by Abkco Films. At the Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 EastHouston Street, East Village. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10minutes. This film is not rated.

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WITH: Brontis Jodorowsky (Jaime), Pamela Flores (Sara), Jeremias Herskovits (Alejandroas a child), Alejandro Jodorowsky (Alejandro as an adult), Bastian Bodenhöfer (CarlosIbáñez), Andres Cox (Don Aquiles), Adan Jodorowsky (Anarchist) and CristobalJodorowsky (Theosophist).

A version of this review appears in print on May 23, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition withthe headline: Family Memoir in a Dreamscape.

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