Alejandro Jodorowsky has been making a long-awaited return to the screen with The Dance of Reality (Danza De La Realidad) a pseudo-autobiographical take on his Chilean childhood based on his own 2001 memoir of the same name, which debuted at the Cannes.
The first film in 23 years from the great Jodorowsky is a kind of home movie writ large.
Jodorowsky said:
Before we started, I said to the crew, ‘I am trying to heal my soul. But it's not an egocentric, narcissistic picture. Poetry doesn't speak about history. It speaks about interior life, universal problems.'
His wife, Pascale Montandon, was the costume designer, and three of his sons appear including Brontis who in 1970s El Topo portrayed the son of the title character (Jodorowsky). In The Dance of Reality, Brontis plays Jodorowsky's Stalin-like father, whom the filmmaker described as ‘a very terrible father, a very hard man, but he had his reasons.'
The entire story is swathed in surreal mythology and circus-like extravaganzas similar to Fellini. It's not an accident, it's a choice as Jodorowsky has been many similar things such as circus clown, puppeteer, creator of mime routines for Marcel Marceau, co-founder with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor of the 1960s surrealist theatre group The Panic Movement, comics writer, tarot reader, intellectual, and psychotherapist.
Check out the trailer which looks cerebral and seems to have been harvested from the same dreamscape that leads to his earlier work, Santa Sangre (1990).
