EL TOPO Alejandro Jodorowsky as . . . Clint Eastwood? |
Some who despise Salvador Dalí have found a distasteful double in cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. Both could be dismissed as cheesy Surrealists, megalomaniac hustlers peddling their wares to the too-easily impressed. Dalí, who along with Orson Welles was to have appeared in Jodorowsky’s never-made adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, was certainly a shrewd self-promoter. Jodorowsky, whose midnight-movie head-trip duo, El Topo (1970) and La montaña sagrada|The Holy Mountain (1973), play at the Brattle in an enticing retro double bill this week, seems a different, quainter bird (both films return to the Coolidge Corner in March).Dali was a society darling, a royalist and Fascist who fluttered about General Franco’s rectum; the Chilean Jodorowsky, born in 1929, is a lifetime anarchist and outsider, drifting from one Latin American country to another, fighting with, and alienating, everyone. Although perpetually declaring himself to be a genius, he hasn’t been able to finance a film since the little-seen The Rainbow Thief (1990), which starred Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Christopher Lee. He doesn’t seem to realize that his football fields of Surrealist images, however much fun to watch popping up on the screen, don’t add up to a spoonful of meaning. What’s said in Breakfast at Tiffany’s about Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly applies in clubs and spades to Jodorowsky. “Holly’s a phony phony. She doesn’t know that she’s a phony.” Neither does the wildly entertaining, totally fraudulent Jodorowsky.
Pre–Rocky Horror, El Topo was the original midnight-movie breakthrough, playing nightly in 1970-’71 at Greenwich Village’s Elgin Theatre, with John Lennon among the repeat viewers. Dazed fans walked home at 2 am, sated by Jodorowsky’s bitchin’ brew of Taoism, Buddhism, and Buñuelism, with narrative and music blithely ripped off from spaghetti westerns. Riding through the desert, El Topo (Jodorowsky himself) is Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, a crack shot and deadpan killer adrift in a world of hairy, smelly brutes, chortling desperados. The first section is the most Leone-like, rampant in spilled blood, with El Topo coolly offing one heinous hothead after another. What you never saw from Eastwood: El Topo has his naked seven-year-old son at his side, and he even allows junior to blow up one of the baddies.
Parts two and three of El Topo segue into a scrambled huevo of spiritual motifs, random images of saints and sinners, the holy and the unholy, six-guns and Siddhartha. Our hero abandons his son for a demanding hussy who sends him on a quest to fight four Zen-like masters. Then she scoots off herself with a Lesbian in Black. Then the bullet-wounded El Topo wakes up 20 years later inside a cave occupied by cripples and hunchbacks. Then he shaves his skull, turns penitent, and wanders into a hell town of slaves, creeps, predators, and murderers. Oh, humanity!
The El Topo character returns in loincloth and hippy hair (Horacio Salinas) for La montaña sagrada (1973), where the evil town of the previous film is identifiable as modern-day Mexico City. The military mow down student protesters while tourists snap photographs; no wonder the Christ-like hero joins a trek out of town in search of the holy mount. Who plays the wise guru who leads the pilgrims while philosophizing in pidgin Spanish-English? Jodorowsky, naturally, a babbling brook of spiritual poppycock. But fun!
