EL TOPO
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Very strange, very pretentious, but absorbing and compelling nonetheless. The movie that put Alejandro Jodorowsky on the cult-movie map, now available once again as a Japanese laserdisc import.
Hordes of cripples come flooding down the mountainside in search of vengeance. A wise man of the desert is buried under a deluge of white rabbits. A vicious generalissimo is castrated and commits suicide out of shame. A mad priest exhorts his followers to play Russian roulette as a sign of their devotion.
Describing EL TOPO, one of the weirdest and most deliberately pretentious movies ever made, is a fool's errand. Summarizing the plot doesn't help; in the end you're inclined to flap your arms and say, "Just see the movie." EL TOPO was, and is, as much an experience as it was a movie, especially when it first came out in 1971 and created a storm of cultishness and controversy. Now once again available legitimately as a Japanese laserdisc, albeit at the viciously high price of $90-$110, it should be at least seen once by anyone with a taste for the bizarre.
In the abstract, EL TOPO plays something like a Western as written and directed by Jim Morrison; in fact, director Alejandro Jodorowsky has cited Morrison as being a favorite of his. The main character is a nameless gunslinger, who comes out of the desert to fight evil and prove himself worthy of the love of a woman he rescues from the hands of cruel and perverse bandits. He faces several outlandish obstacles and tests, but in the end, his hands close on thin air, and everything he has worked for evaporates. He is reborn as a kind of holy fool, and then works to help a family of cripples and dwarves escape the confines of their cavelike prison and rejoin the outside world.
I mentioned EL TOPO was pretentious. This isn't neccesarily a bad thing. EL TOPO is, if nothing, ambitious as hell in its attempts to be pretentious. In a way, it's a welcome relief from movies where there's clearly nothing on the director's mind. So much is on the minds of the people who made EL TOPO, that it's amazing anything like a story has come out of it. EL TOPO is loaded with so many striking and powerful images that the story almost becomes irrelevant. Some of the editing and photography is truly remarkable; I can see how music-video directors could have taken many cues from this movie. There is never a moment when there's not something interesting happening on-screen, even if we don't understand it completely.
EL TOPO is a hard movie to recommend, because it cheerfully defies just about every convention of moviemaking. It doesn't tell a logical story, but it does tell an emotionally interesting one. It doesn't subscribe to typical conventions of plotting or character. It's "different" in the broadest sense of the term, and anyone who is determined to see something different -- something so far outside the realm of movies as we know them that they have to start from scratch -- will be curious. But everyone's reactions are certain to be wildly different. If nothing else, EL TOPO is a great way to start a long conversation -- or end one.
Three out of four paths to enlightenment.
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