After an absence of 23 years Alejandro Jodorowsky returns to our screens with a blast of surrealist psychotherapy that is as refreshing as it is self-indulgent. For nearly a quarter of a century Jodorowsky has been doing everything but making films, from directing theatre to writing graphic novels to pioneering his own form of psychotherapy called ‘psychomagic’. Based on his self-penned memoirs, The Dance of Reality is an idiosyncratic example of ‘film as therapy’ with Jodorowsky taking us back to his adolescence in 1930’s Chile.
Set in his childhood town of Tocopilia, we meet a young Jodorowsky as he lives under the stern control of his Stalin-obsessed father, Jaime. The Dance of Reality is ostensibly simply a series of lyrical vignettes covering key moments in Jodorowsky’s childhood, although the film takes a dramatic third act detour, following Jaime on a transformative journey that culminates in a traumatically bizarre and mildly misguided series of extremely unpleasant sequences.
Jodorowsky boldly casts his own son Brontis as his father, and to further complicate the Oedipal stakes steps into the film several times as a guide directing the young boy who plays himself. The film is frequently confronting as an exercise in exposing his family’s fallibility, as Jodorowsky uses the medium of film to exorcise his own personal demons.
At 130 minutes, the film is occasionally tiring but the overall impact of Jodorowsky’s free-associative imagination is hard to ignore. The Dance of Reality feels like it is a film out of time. The sense they don’t make them like they used to pervades the entire enterprise as the spirit of 1970s psychotronic cinema spills through the film like liquid LSD. Jodorowsky packs the piece with as many strange asides and surreal interludes as he can fit, furiously stroking the viewer’s synapses with the urgency of a much younger filmmaker. It’s certainly a refreshing experience in many ways – genuine, bold and heartfelt – but also exhausting.
Dwarves, limbless beggars, an opera-singing mother, bizarre nudity and Freudian asides all add up to a satisfyingly iconoclastic return to the big screen for Jodorowsky. The Dance of Reality is not nearly a perfect film; in fact it is close to a complete mess, but Jodorowsky’s emotional sincerity holds the whole enterprise together with a sense of old-school authenticity that is missing in many modern films. His mode of cinema may not have evolved much over the last few decades, but it is a welcome presence in our cold, clinical days of stylised extremity. Let’s hope we see more from this gonzo grandmaster extremely soon.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
The Dance of Reality
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
France, 2013, 130 minutes
Melbourne International Film Festival
25 July – 12 August
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