SANTA SANGRE
(directed by Alejandro Jojoworsky, 1989)
****+ (out of 5)
.
> I saw this typically weird, willfully lurid Alejandro Jodorowsky fantasia back in the early 90’s, and while most of the details faded with time, a few passages were permanently seared into the folds of my brain:
. One, was the open-air elephant burial sequence, which proved to be even more spectacular than I remembered it, and the other was the pathos of a son, acting as surrogate for his mother’s severed arms, sitting behind her and playing piano through the empty sleeves of her dress, as though she herself were stroking the ivories. What I had forgotten, was the entire context.
. This, like every Jodorowsky film really, was partly biography. Again, with the circus motif, which makes sense if you know his personal history. This eye-popping fantasy is populated by Jodorowsky’s usual retinue of sad clowns and feisty dwarfs and mute mimes and cross-dressing strongmen- all the usual suspects.
.This singular, lurid drama tells the story of “Fenix”, (Phoenix?), a boy who grew up as part of a circus family, but was gradually driven mad by his domineering mother, eventually becoming her surrogate murderer when she takes psychic control of both his hands. Mom is a tightrope walker and religious zealot who leads a congregation of women who venerate a maimed girl as their armless saint. The cult is called “Santa Sangre”, after the “holy blood” of their imagined martyr. Mom herself looses both arms when she confronts her husband the knife-thrower in bed with the tattooed woman.
. Yes, there is plenty of violence. It’s part of Jodorowsky’s recipe. It is an imagined universe rife with brutality and strange, otherworldly visions- like the elephant funeral and the flood of people in dirty suits who scramble down into a ravine to tear off its flesh in the aftermath. That is just a sequence I will never forget. For decades I was under the mistaken impression I saw it in a Herzog film. Wrong attribution all these years, but the image itself? Indelible! Again, the eccentric filmmaker employs his entire family Axel, Adan and Teo Jodorowsky all appear in it. This artist famously homogenizes his personal life with his art, into one always-controversial package. Considering the extremity of his vision, this might not be a good thing. Like all his films, SANTA SANGRE is more than passingly bizarre and often disturbing stuff.
– Jodorowsky’s is a world of metaphor and symbol, bombast and chutzpah, and SANTA SANGRE is a surreal melodrama that dives naked and headfirst into the dark pool of the human id.
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