La Danza de la Realidad (The Dance of Reality)

Here is a measure of the e ccentric brilliance of Alejandro Jodorowsky's 2013 The Dance of Reality. Consider this scenario: in a remote Chilean seaport, a Jewish dry goods merchant, Jaime Jodorowsky, feuds with fellow firemen.  Jaime worships Stalin and is a True Believer in the Communist Party.  When the local miners strike, they march through the village to the beach and assemble by the sea.  The miners are a horde of men and haggard women dressed in funereal black and carrying battered black umbrellas. They stalk across an unbelievably desolate moonscape -- the gorges and bare peaks of the Atacama Desert, parading finally through Main Street and onto the beach with a bunch of mangy dogs leading the way.  The firefighters, who are also the local police, aim their guns at the strikers and refuse to give them water.  Jaime harnesses his two burros and courageously transports several large barrels of water to the beach.  The miners are also hungry, however, and they butcher his two donkeys and eat them raw.  "You've killed my donkeys," Jaime howls. "How will I bring you water tomorrow?" grasping, it seems, the illogical logic of violent revolution. Horrified, Jaime hobbles back to his dry goods store crying out that the firemen are going to "burn (him) to death."  He collapses on the floor of his shop, police battering at the door to arrest him.  Jaime's wife is a woman who looks somewhat like a Botero painting come to life:  the woman is heavy with enormous creamy breasts that overflow her too-tight blouses.  This is young Alejandro's mother, the mother of our director -- for the film is, in fact, a sort of spiritual autobiography.  She never speaks but rather sings in the mezzo-soprano voice of an opera diva.  Alejandro's mother squats over the dying Jaime -- his skin looks burned and he is twitching as if with a seizure.  She prays for God to overflow His banks within her and grant His healing waters to poor Jaime.  Then, she lifts up her dress and urinates all over her husband's chest and groin.  This act restores Jaime to health and, in fact, emboldens him to action:  he decides to assassinate the dictator of Chile, Carlos Ibanez del Campo.  The scene in which Jaime's wife drenches her gravely wounded husband with her urine is weirdly moving and, in fact, her micturition takes on a religious, even, sacramental character.  Jodorowsky, who is now 84, directed two cult films that were hugely successful in the late sixties and early seventies -- El Topo and The Holy Mountain.  Too uncompromising for the studios, Jodorowsky's career foundered; indeed, his ill-fated attempt to adapt Frank Herbert's Dune may have stigmatized him as a director simply too extravagant, unpredictable, and scandalous for the industry.  He made a couple of other movies, including the bizarre Santa Sangre and, then, vanished.  (He lives in Paris where he has worked as a Shamanistic therapist and written several dozen metaphysically oriented, if action-packed, comic books; he has also published books on psychotherapy and the Tarot.)  The first half-hour of The Dance of Reality doesn't feel like the work of an eighty-year old artist.  Indeed, this part of the film is so bursting with energy and so densely patterned with extraordinary visual imagery that the movie seems, at first, to be one of the best films ever made.  The picture is 130 minutes long and can't sustain the frenetic, surreal attack of its first half hour, but it remains compelling, frightening,and convincingly visionary throughout its entire length. Jodorowsky isn't interested in consistency and the film divides into two halves that seem mutually incommensurate.  In the first part of the film, Jodorowsky's father is monstrously cruel, a martinet who puts out cigarettes on the palm of his own hand to demonstrate his courage.  He slaps little Alejandro until his tooth is knocked out -- it's a test of courage -- and, then, forces the dentist to repair the injury by drilling in the child's mouth without any anesthesia.  A huge portrait of Stalin graces the dry goods shop, something called the Gran Casa Ukrana, referring to the family's origin as Ukrainian Jews.  Little Alejandro has girlish long hair and he consorts with a Theosophist on the beach, a naked man with a shaved head whose body is covered with cabalistic tattoos.  He also itches the back of a double amputee, a worker whose hands were blown off in an mine explosion.  The double amputee is part of a Greek chorus of about a dozen amputees, some of them sans both arms and legs who haunt the streets around the shop, evidence of the brutal industrial practices in the mines.  Jaime hates the cripples and in one scene that derives from Bunuel kicks the quadruple amputee like a soccer ball.  Jodorowsky is imbued with Latin American machismo and his brutal father-figure turns out to be heroic.  The director regards filmmaking as a species of war and calls his actors and actresses his warriors and this attitude is evident in the way The Dance of Reality develops, shifting gears in its second half after the father's resurrection by urine into an account of Jaime's heroism and, finally, conversion into a kind of Christian mystic.  Jaime decides to assassinate Chile's dictator, fails in that endeavor, and finds that his hands are paralyzed, frozen into hideous-looking claws.  He forgets his identity and is aroused only months later when his buxom wife sends him a message by stone lofted into the air incongruously by white balloons. Jaime wakes up in bed with a hunchbacked female dwarf, abandons her, and, then, embarks on a spiritual pilgrimage. (The scenes involving the dwarf and her love for Jaime are powerful, poignant, and emotionally effective:  the poor creature knows that God will take Jaime away from her and so she hangs herself.)  Jaime encounters a saintly carpenter, attends a Church where the Chilean parishioners sing "How Great Thou Art," and, finally, is captured by Nazis and tortured horribly.  Curiously, Jodorowski ends the film on a note of conventional, if outrageous, Christian piety.  Jaime's great-bosomed wife lifts her wounded husband into the air like a sort of voluptuous pieta and, then, the family departs the village, Tocopilla, on Charon's boat, a purplish vessel vanishing into a white sea, piloted by a skeleton. (The scene is similar to the equally visionary ending of Boorman's Excaliber.) Throughout the picture, the exceptionally handsome and charismatic Alejandro Jodorowsky appears cradling the young boy in his arms and offering him lyrical spiritual guidance -- the film is a family production, Jaime is played by Jodorowsky's son, the naked child in El Topo almost fifty years ago, and many of the cast members are Jodorowky's grandchildren, including the little boy who plays the wide-eyed Alejandro as an eight-year old.  Jodorowsky's ideas verge on Jungian kitsch -- he regards the world as a "vale of soul-making" -- but his imagery is so surreal and compelling that one can overlook, I think, the stupidity of many of his philosophical and shamanistic ideas.  In some ways, Jodorowsky's film resembles the work of Dusan Makajayev, particularly the excremental imagery of Sweet Movie or the Reichian sexual adventures in WR:  Mysteries of the Organism.  But Jodorowsky's sensibility, compounded of Latin American machismo and Jungian psychodynamics is completely and undeniably singular.  On a purely visual level, there is no doubt that he is one of the greatest of living film makers.  And who can resist a movie that begins with Louis Prima's "Sing, Sing, Sing" as a sound-cue for gold doubloons, a golden shower, as it were, streaming out of the sky?