Quinzaine Cannes: Jodorowsky Focus

“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. (…) 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.” (A. O. Scott, The New York Times)
 
With a fierce cult following, best known for his outrageously surreal films from the 60s and 70s (EL TOPO, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN), blending mysticism, sexualized violence and religious provocation, the "Grand Wizard of midnight movies" (as The Hollywood Reporter calls him) returned to the big screen after a hiatus of nearly 25 years, with his 2013 feature THE DANCE OF REALITY, a semi-autobiographical look at the filmmaker’s youth in the remote Chilean town of Tocopilla in the early 1930s. Blending his personal history with metaphor, mythology, and poetry, the film reflects Jodorowsky’s philosophy that reality is not objective, but rather a dance created by our own imagination.
 
With the filmmaker himself serving as both the narrator and as an on-screen guide, "the first half of the film focuses on young Alejandro and his complicated relationship with his parents - father Jaime (played by the filmmaker's son, Brontis Jodorowsky) is a Stalin-obsessed brute consumed with making a man out of his seemingly effeminate son by any means necessary; mother Sara is an overly doting type whose every word is literally delivered as an operatic aria. In the second half, the focus shifts to Jaime and his dramatic conversion from communism to radicalism that leads him to abandon his family to set off on a quest to assassinate the hateful military leader, Carlos Ibanez, a mission that threatens to leave him both physically and spiritually crippled as a result..” (Peter Sobczynski, rogerebert.com)

Taking place in a mythical Miami, THE VOICE THIEF follows the protagonist’s nighttime odyssey in search of for his opera-singer-wife’s lost voice, as he meets a dwarf prostitute, a transvestite and her gold dripping vagina, and many self-doubts. “Embodied with humor and absurdity, the film is a neo-extravagant fantasy blending the bitter-sweetness of a romantic drama with the grotesqueness of an ego-maniacal intensity. Its multiple layers are captivating: it is as much a strong essay focused on searching the essence of humanity, as a contemplation on the alienated self in a mad world invaded by over-sexuality, rebelliousness and despair.” (Ioana Mischie, Nisimazine)