The Dance of Reality (2013)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Dance of Reality (2013) – A. Jodorowsky

Unmistakably a Jodorowsky film (with lots of taboo-breaking) but yet somehow more tender than his earlier films (El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre, etc.).  Perhaps this is because the 84-year-old director is in a more reflective mode, looking back at his own childhood and even appearing in person to cradle and console the actor playing his younger self at times.  This could easily be his last film.  Perhaps too Jodorowsky’s growing interest in “psychomagic” as a form of therapy has colored the approach taken to the characters, with more forgiveness granted even as the depiction of his father as a Stalinist brute shows us Jodorowsky’s real pain.  However, things are not that straightforward and there are plenty of opportunities for surrealistic detours into life in Chile at that time (or perhaps it is all fantasy?).  Oddball and slyly comic, sensitive and jarring at the same time, but ultimately the complete and real deal – no one makes films like this, but they should.