In the spirit of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mystical preoccupations, I say that his first film in almost twenty-five years is a major blessing. Here, an 80-something Jodorowsky tells us everything that he knows about memory, childhood and making peace with mortality. He’s wise and witty and, for such an uncompromising surrealist, a great storyteller. His most bizarre tangents ring true. Also, his jokes are funny, his eye for startling imagery remains keen and his boldness knows no boundaries.
This is a heavy film that blows by like a breeze. That’s because it’s just as much autobiography as it is philosophy. It’s a story that its creator burns to tell before it’s too late. The main character is Jodorowsky himself, as a child in a small Chilean village (the same village, shot on-location, in which he grew up). His communist, atheist father is an unlikable brute and his mother is a flighty, God-believing Venus of Willendorf whose dialogue consists solely of (literal) operatic singing. Both parents start off as broad, strange impressions of Jodorowsky’s memory of them, but they acquire more dimension as the film progresses. They change and grow over time just like their son does. Writer/director/narrator Jodorowsky, much older now than every one of these people, sees it all, acknowledges it all. There are no monsters here. Everyone’s human.
A devastatingly personal work, Jodorowsky makes it like it’s going to be his last. I cried twice. The crowd I saw it with applauded for the film when it ended and the theater lobby afterward teemed with discussion over its meanings and merits. Over time, give it a few years maybe, and I think this could emerge as the popular favorite of Jodorowsky’s work.