The Great Movies III

Does the story have a happy ending? No. But it has resolution, reconciliation, forgiveness (although not of Sansho). It has the conversion of Zushio, and the spectacular turn his fortune takes. After all of that more still happens, but for that you must see the film. At some point during the watching, Sansho the Bailstops being a fable or a narrative and starts being a lament, and by that time it is happening to us as few films do.

Anthony Lane, the film critic for the New Yorker, did a profile of Mizoguchi a few years ago in which he wrote these extraordinary words: "I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal."

To call Santa Sangre (1989) a horror film would be unjust to a film that exists outside all categories. But in addition to its deeper qualities, it is a horror film, one of the greatest, and after waiting patiently through countless Dead Teenager Movies, I am reminded by Alejandro Jodorowsky that true psychic horror is possible on the screen-horror, poetry, surrealism, psychological pain, and wicked humor, all at once.

The movie involves the perverse emotional and physical enslavement of a son by his mother-a control all the more macabre when we learn, late in the film, the secret of its actual nature. It is also about an instinctive hatred between characters representing lust and chastity, which are both seen as perversions in a world without a sane middle way. This bold subject matter is orchestrated by Jodorowsky in a film that inspires critics to make lists, calling it Jungian, surrealistic, Felliniesque, Bunuelian, sadomasochistic, expressionist, and strongly flavored by such horror classics as The Beast With Five Fingers, The Hands of Orlac, and the film that guides the hero's fantasies, The Invisible Man.

The story involves Fenix, the boy magician at the Circus Gringo, a shabby touring show in Mexico. Played by two ofJodorowsky's sons (Adan at about eight, Axel at about twenty), Fenix is the child of the beautiful trapeze artist Concha (Blanca Guerra) and the bloated circus owner and knife thrower Orgo (Guy Stockwell). Always at Fenix's side is the dwarf Aladin (Jesus Juarez), who acts as his assistant and moral support. The little magician's best friend is Alma (Faviola Elenka Tapia and, when older, Sabrina Dennison). She is a deaf-mute mime, the daughter of the carnal tattooed lady (Thelma Tixou), who works as the target for Orgo's knives.

One night when Concha is suspended above the circus ring by her hair, she sees Orgo caressing the tattooed lady and screams to be brought back to earth. In a rage, she surprises them in bed and throws acid on Orgo's genitals. Bellowing with pain, he severs her arms with mighty thrusts of two knives. Then he kills himself, the acid having rendered him uninteresting to women tattooed and otherwise.

Concha's mutilation is a cruel irony: she is the leader of a cult of women who worship a saint whose arms were cut off by rapists. Their church contains a pool of blood, no doubt suggesting menstrual fluid (Concha's name is Mexican slang for the vagina); its members wear tunics with crossed, severed arms. When authorities arrive to bulldoze the church, there is a clash between the women and the police, and then a shouting match between Concha and the local monsignor, she screaming that the pool contains holy blood, he replying that it is red paint.

The bulldozing reveals the shabby construction of the church, mostly made of corrugated iron and possibly reflecting the film's limited budget. If Jodorowsky's funds were limited, however, his imagery and imagination are boundless, and this movie thrums with erotic and diabolical energy. Consider the scene where the circus elephant dies after hemorrhaging from its trunk. In a funeral both sad and funny, the beast's great coffin is hauled by truck to a ravine and tipped over the edge-to the delight of wretched shanty-dwellers, who rip open the casket and throw bloody elephant meat to the crowd. An image like this is one of the reasons we go to the movies: it is logical, illogical, absurd, pathetic, and sublimely original. For Alejandro Jodorowsky, all in a day's work.

Now seventy-four and at work on his first film in fourteen years, Jodorowsky is a legendary man of many trades. Born in Chile, living mostly in Mexico and Paris, he works here in English, which has been imperfectly dubbed; oddly enough, the oddness of the dubbing adds to the film's eerie quality.