This film has been my introduction to the cinema of Chilean-born director, Alejandro Jodorowski - and what a cinema it is! A cornucopia of the fantastically surreal, horrific halucinations and littered with moments of touching poignancy - indeed, something for every fan of film.
Fenix (played by the director's son) is in some kind of hospital. In flashback we are shown how, being brought up in a travelling circus, he was traumatised by the sight of his womanising father (caught in flagrante) chopping off his mother's arms before committing suicide slitting his own throat. After a night out on the town with a collection of other disabled patients Fenix escapes the hospital to reform a travelling troupe with his deformed mother. Gathering together the old crew the show takes off but, as a deaf mute from his past seeks him out having escaped her whore captor, Fenix finds himself murdering the women around him on behalf of his mother. With the entrance of the mute in the film's climax and the realisation of his love for her the symbiosis between mother and son faces its toughest challenge, a challenge that one or both of them might not survive.
The filming started when Alejandro was commissioned to make a film based on real-life Mexican criminal Gregorio Cárdenas; yet from this inauspicious beginning, under the director's guidance a truly resplendent surreal horror feature referencing a broad scope of Mexican cinema has been sculpted. Personally speaking, I am practically ignorant of the direct references to Mexican cinema in this film as i have seen very few films from that country, however that is not to say other cinematic comparisons cannot be drawn; in many ways this film struck me as very European (perhaps it is also worthy to note here that a large amount of funding came from Italy).
Fenix's relationship with his mother, letting his hands become hers doing her bidding, evokes memories of the twins in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers where one of the brothers sleeps with the women of the other. Then there's the vengeance itself stemming it would seem from some sort of perverse incestual feeling between the mother and her son, using her son's limbs to enact her jealousy against those young licentious women whose bodies entice her precious son away from her - much in the same way The Birds attack Tippi Hedren's character in Hitchock's thriller. The cinematography within the film is of the consistent aesthetic vibrancy you'd expect from Luciano Tovoli in a Dario Argento horror (for example Suspiria) and the music, well it's glorious but in a way like i've found in no other movie so far. Combining all these ingredients [and more] in the hands of Jodorowsky has produced something akin to a Felliniesque horror, a Mexican Satyricon with lashings of gore if you will. Unique in it's vision, extraordinary in execution the film comes across like Passolini on acid.
Don't get me wrong though - this acidic virtuosity, grandiose as it is, remains underpinned by a seriously well-writen screenplay with solid, real characters you can care for and believe in. The startling imagery, sometimes prone to flights of exotic fancy, is not the heart and soul of the film - rather an awesome dressing that tops off a sumptuous cinematic feast that deftly [and at times shockingly] combines compelling performances with heightened moments of melodrama and surrealism. When the violently ecstatic gore comes it's in floods, but not distractingly so - if anything these extreme death scenes display a certain quality of endearment towards the films [i assume] it is homaging. And then, to tie the dizzying narrative together we have religious iconography, such as Fenix grappling with a snake, a Jesus-figure surrounded by chickens and various animals lapping up human blood.
Totally absorbing from start to finish, Alejandro still has one card left to play - challenging the viewer's perception of almost everything he has just witnessed - that he deals right at the last moment in the film's final scene. Did we really just see what we thought we saw? This is not some lame clichéd plot twist that will aggrieve, rather it's a challenge on the audience, an avenue via which one can re-examine the film from a new perspective gaining perhaps a fresh insight into the movie's characters that now maintain a wholy different resonance the second time round.
The film, in short, is a must-see. 9/10
