Santa sangre (1989)

Alejandro Jodorowsky has taken the rules of film-making, spat on them, and thrown them in the dirt. His surrealist, Mexican melodrama may be one of the single strangest films I have ever watched, but one which shows that when untethered by the bonds of convention, art can occur in bloody, ugly, fantastic ways.

Fenix was a boy magician in a circus run by his father and mother. The latter, Concha, was a devout leader of the Church of Santa Sangre--the Church of Holy Blood. Finding her husband cheating on her with the Tattooed Woman, Concha attacks her husband who in turn cuts her arms off and slits his own throat. Scarred by the images, Fenix is locked away in a school for children with Down syndrome where he lives like a feral cat for years. Once grown, his armless mother returns to him, helps him escape and uses him to exact her revenge on the corrupting world of women.

Jodorowky's film is less a telling of a story and more like a series of dreams being realized. His style is a combination of David Lynch and Federico Fellini; a blending of the phantasmagorical, the sublime, and the episodic. Going through his movie one does not learn from words--there are no explanations--but rather ideas that have been melted and beaten into something resembling an image. It is strange and often uncomfortable, but it conjured all sorts of ideas of my own.

The film is like a birth and death happening in tandem. Its imagery is shocking, ugly, yet magnificent in its uniqueness and the unabashed way in which it tries to be ugly. Watching the clipped story lines of love and loss, religion and madness were both frustrating in their lack of convention, and hypnotic simply because it all felt so new. Jodorowsky is a poet of the blackest sort, but I have to say that his rhymes were too clever for me to puzzle out the meanings.

Some of his creations were exuberant and full of life. I felt very strongly that if this were translated for the stage it could be an astounding piece of performance art. Its magic would be difficult to carry across mediums, but the heightened dialogue and its sense of being very tangible even through all its absurdity makes me think that a theatre audience might appreciate it as a play.

That said, it is not, and as a film I find it very hard to believe that people could "like" this movie. I didn't "like" this film, but I certainly appreciated the concept and the performances by Axel Jodorowsky and Blanca Guerra. As entertainment, "Santa sangre" fails. But as a realized nightmare rife with hidden meaning it is striking. If you feel up to the challenge I encourage you to watch, but don't anticipate an easy ride. The film will challenge you to keep pace, and I must admit that by the end I was huffing and puffing.

3/4