The Dance of Reality [La Danza de la realidad] **** (2013, Brontis Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores, Jeremias Herskovits) – Movie Review

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s provocative Amarcord-style portrait of the artist film director as a young man is quite an eyeful and a total bonkers head-banger. It’s either a work of genius or awful, or both. Maybe it’s a work of genius with awful bits, or an awful film with flashes of genius. On proper reflection, I’m going for a work of genius with awful bits.

It’s a weird and eventually haunting assault on the senses, with an amazing visual style, a stack of mixed and oblique messages in the text and brave, brilliant performances. At least a couple of awful bits make you want to leave the cinema – the mother peeing, the father being tortured by Nazis and the kid being blacked up.

It’s time for some challenging cinema in a summer of weak blockbusters – and here it is. Jodorowsky mixes a tribute to Fellini’s Amarcord with Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg in his themes and especially in the main character of the mother Sara (Pamela Flores), who bares her ample breasts and sings her entire role opera-style, hilariously.

The octogenarian Jodorowsky appears as himself as an old man, befriending his Alejandro self as a child (Jeremias Herskovits) and his real-life son Brontis Jodorowsky plays his father, Jaime. [This is mirrored by Sara referring to her son as her father.] Flores is certainly brilliant, but so are the boy, the dad and the old man.

I quote the production note for a few details to help out a little: ‘Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in 1929 in Tocopilla, a coastal town on the edge of the Chilean desert where this film was shot. It was there that Jodorowsky underwent an unhappy and alienated childhood as part of an uprooted family. Blending his personal history with metaphor, mythology and poetry, The Dance of Reality reflects Jodorowsky’s philosophy that reality is not objective but rather a “dance” created by our own imaginations.’

Actually, that doesn’t really help at all. Just go see the movie. Delivering a personal and political statement, as well as a surrealist fantasy, Alejandro Jodorowsky is working at the peak of his powers. It’s good too that, if you are in tune, it is funny almost throughout.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2832

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