EL TOPO (1971)
"I do not fear killing you, for there is no death."
4 out of ****
Starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Mara Lorenzio, Paula Romo, Jacqueline Luis; Written & Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky; Cinematography by Rafael Corkidi
To trash EL TOPO requires no effort, for its flaws are plain to see. It makes no sense. It is punctuated by abrupt and inconsistent tonal shifts. It is full of exaggerated violence and gratuitous nudity. It features hordes of physically "abnormal" people who are paraded across the screen in service of the film's freakshow aesthetic. There are absurd gunfights and duels in which wounds are represented by immense quantities of patently fake blood. It offers itself up to harsh criticism with an abandon that is almost perverse. I loved it.
EL TOPO ignores all traditional approaches to narrative and characterization and thematic development. One can still judge it by those standards, of course, but why bother? They are meaningless within its parameters. Instead, the movie indulges all the tasteless or risky or extreme impulses which other filmmakers tiptoe around, perhaps in fear of what might be set loose. It starts as a Western of sorts, ends as an apocalyptic spiritual drama, and never bothers to explain itself in the interim. It is to be experienced, not understood.
In the opening sequence, a gunslinger in black--El Topo, played by writer/director Alejandro Jodorowsky--rides out of the desert and dismounts. Seated behind him is a naked seven-year-old boy; he too dismounts, and hunkers down in the sand. The gunslinger hands the boy a teddy bear and a picture of his mother. He tells the boy that he is a man now, and so must bury his first toy and the picture of his mother. The boy does so. They ride off, and the film is already pregnant with potential Oedipal conflicts (Freud would have a field day with this movie).
El Topo and the boy arrive in a village where the people have been slaughtered. They learn that some bandits led by The Colonel are responsible for the bloodbath. They locate them in a monastery, and slay them. El Topo then leaves the boy in the care of the monks and rides off into the desert with The Colonel's kept woman. She asks El Topo to prove his love to her by duelling four mysterious Masters. He agrees to do so. None of these events are linked by recognisable logic. With either a sinking heart or a sense of liberation--depending on your taste--you abandon all hope of making sense of what is going on.
Events become stranger, until the action seems to exist as an excuse for a succession of grotesque and memorable images. Some of these images are merely parodic: gunfights which end in characters dying protracted deaths after being shot by an inordinate number of bullets. Some are absurd and blatant Freudianisms: a woman drinking a jet of water spurting from a phallic rock in the middle of a desert. Some are outrageous and inspired: in a church in a strange town, members of the congregation prove their faith by taking a gun loaded with a single bullet from the minister and playing Russian roulette--those who have no faith die. And some are small moments of off-the-cuff weirdness: a man with no arms braids another man's hair with his toes.
There is much more. It is simple enough to describe EL TOPO as a catalogue of freakish, disconnected images, because that is how it unfolds. On a narrative and thematic level, it never seems to add up, nor does that seem to be the intention. The overall effect is, however, wildly subversive. Jodorowsky explodes conventions at every turn, upsetting preconceived notions of gender and character. Women kiss women. Men kiss men. Men dress up as women. Men speak with the voices of women, and vice versa. The protagonist dies, and is reborn, his black hair now white, and he becomes a benign pilgrim instead of a murderous gunslinger. All is in flux.
The gunslinger's rebirth divides the movie in two. The second half is better; it seems more purposeful. El Topo comes to life in a cavern, inhabited by crippled, misshapen, and otherwise deformed people. They are trapped, wishing to escape to a nearby town. El Topo shaves his head, dons a monkish robe, leaves the cavern with his midget attendant, and goes to the town. It is inhabited by people dressed in incongruous Victorian clothing. They act out strange parodies of recognisable social situations--a church service, a boxing match, a brothel--as if their behaviour is twisted out of true by the force of the primal urges they are striving to contain.
El Topo's actions lead to an apocalyptic finale: a confrontation between the "civilized" folk of the town and those who have emerged, like insects, from their hole in the mountain, the very embodiment of the marginalized and repressed of society. This is the return of the unconscious, with a vengeance. Jodorowsky's sympathies are clearly with the outcasts. His film stands in relation to mainstream cinema as the pariahs do to the townfolk. It reveals what the majority prefers to keep concealed. It embraces the physical in all its manifestations, human and animal, beautiful and grotesque. It is saturated with acts of violence, blood, sex, bodies of all kinds.
It is unlikely that anyone will ever call EL TOPO a perfect movie. In some sense, it is not even a good movie. But it is unique. And while good movies are plentiful, unique movies are, by definition, one of a kind, and so to be cherished. The presence of other directors can be felt--Fellini, Buñuel, and, in the Western-derived material, Sergio Leone--but even if those filmmakers had never made a single movie, one senses that EL TOPO would look much as it does now. It is the work of a man possessed by not one vision but by a thousand: a man who wants to cram them all into two hours, and will use whatever internal logic suits his purposes to achieve that end.
The result is a kind of divine madness, celebratory in its excess. Werner Herzog, one of the other great mad visionaries of the cinema, has said that the twentieth century is starved for great images. If we are starving, then EL TOPO is like the miracle of the loaves and fishes: with a few primitive ingredients, it can nourish multitudes.
Review by David Dalgleish (subjective.freeservers.com) -- February 9th, 2000
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