Hello all, this review marks the beginning of a short series I plan on doing on the major films of the great Chilean-born surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky. I am doing this not out of a long-held love for his work (I watched El Topo when I was in high school, and have seen nothing else since), but rather as a means of trying to understand his rather difficult filmography through writing. Over the next few weeks or months, I will attempt to review El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre, and I will begin now with his first feature, Fando Y Lis (Jodorowsky himself has disowned his 1980 film Tusk and seems to have expressed little beyond ambivalence for his failed 1990 blockbuster The Rainbow Thief, and neither film has developed the following of the other four features). I’d like to begin by discussing how I chose to view Jodorowsky’s first surreal and heartbreaking road odyssey. I could sit here and attempt to dissect the precise meaning of all of the dreamlike imagery, a process that would probably take even longer with the more overt Christian imagery in his later work, but I’m not sure if that would really accomplish anything. What matters more is what the film means as a whole and how it affects the viewer in each of these individual moments.
At its core, I guess I would have to say that this is a film about love in both its ideal and real forms. Fando and Lis are two lost souls making their way through a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland on a journey for the mythical city of Tar. Lis is a paraplegic millstone around Fando’s neck, and he has to drag her cart through the desert as it also carries the only two happy mementos of their horrible childhoods, Fando’s drum and Lis’s gramophone. There’s probably something to be said about the fact that the only woman in the film who is given a positive characterization is still a massive burden, but that reading would ignore a lot of the more important aspects of the film. Tar is a place of idealized, perfect love. Both of them see Tar as the ultimate solution to their problems, but the film makes it quite clear that their only true happiness is with each other. In one of the most memorable moments, we see what appears to be a flashback of a happier time in which Fando and Lis run around a room throwing paint all over each other as up-tempo jazz plays in the background. This is almost certainly the happiest moment of the film and it comes closer to representing true love than anything else we see. This is the moment that they should be looking for, not a Utopian dream of perfect love. It is in this attempt to discover a more perfect type of love that they fail with tragic consequences.
The main reason for their failures is in their inability to share their internal sufferings with each other. Throughout their journey, flashbacks show us the horror of their respective youths; Fando’s mother is shown as a part of a sort of cult who abuses him and tortures his beloved father while Lis appears to be molested by a circus troupe. Whether these bizarre flashbacks are objectively true is irrelevant because they serve to convey the pain our leads suffered in their youth and to explain their internal misery in the present. An apparition of Fando’s incredibly Felliniesque mother forces him to kill and rebury her while the clowns from Lis’s flashback return to torture her some more, but neither one seems able to express the pain this causes to the other. They only want to share in the positive aspects of love, but they ignore the need to embrace the inner life of the other. It may be a massive cliché to say, but in this film, love is in the journey, and if you only expect that journey to lead to faultless perfection, then it will fail.
On their journey, Fando and Lis meet dozens of lost souls on this road to hell, all failing to realize the ultimate futility of their journey. A blind man and his father ask to drink Lis’s blood. Some bourgeoisie city-dwellers dance to jazz music in the ruins of what was once a building. Three old women play a game of cards to see who can eat fruit out of a young man’s mouth. A parade of cross-dressers attempts to play with Fando. And so on. On a more thematic level, almost all of these encounters are in some way related to love, and each seems to show a possible, or at least metaphoric, outcome for our characters. The real key to these scenes, however, is in the mood they set. Some of these moments terrified me, some left me brimming with joy, and it is in these emotional responses that we can see how brilliantly Jodorowsky has created this world. For a film to truly inspire these emotions is no small thing. As we come to realize the futility of this journey, our emotional connection to the situation deepens, and these brief encounters take on an increasingly tragic context, as we soon begin to see both ourselves and our beloved characters in these curious people.
Given the surrealism and the Mexican setting, it seems like it would be rather easy to compare Jodorowsky’s film to the work of Luis Bunuel, but I’d say this is only right to a certain extent. For one, as a result of budget and timing and the fantastic, cheap high-contrast film stock, Jodorowsky’s camera is much more varied than the Spanish master’s, employing long takes and verite-style camera-work as much as a more traditionally mannered aesthetic. I’d also contend that they handle their surrealism differently. In Bunuel’s films, I’d argue that it is often presented as more or less objective. The surreal events are what is really happening in the world of the film. This is less true of Jodorowsky, who frequently throws in subjective flashbacks and fantasy sequences, thus going to greater lengths to present his imagery as part of the experience of the characters, so that unlike Bunuel’s more distanced approach, we are emotionally entranced by the tale of Fando and Lis. If anything, this film is as indebted to Fellini as Bunuel, although the director has taken Fellini’s circus atmosphere to its darkest edges. This combination of two of cinema’s greatest minds, when viewed through the lens of another master, has led to a great film, one that deserves praise on the level Jodorowsky’s obvious predecessors. As the birthplace (although never the permanent home) of both my favorite author (Roberto Bolano) and two of cinema’s most beloved dreamers (Jodorowsky and the incomparable late Raul Ruiz), Chile’s additions to the modern surrealist movement cannot be underestimated, and Fando Y Lis marks the birth of an artistic vision that I am eminently excited to further explore.