End­less poetry

“I thought you had changed, but you’re still the same man,” com­plains Sara (Pamela Flo­res), near the begin­ning of Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s End­less Poet­ry, to her unlov­ing, bul­ly­ing hus­band Jaime (Bron­tis Jodor­owsky). On one lev­el Sara’s words serve as a reflex­ive joke. For, like every sin­gle film in Jodorowsky’s oeu­vre (since he debuted in 1968 with Fan­do y Lis), this lat­est fea­ture con­cerns the indi­vid­ual quest for iden­ti­ty, mean­ing and tran­scen­dence in a world of van­i­ty and illusion.

After decades of exper­i­ment­ing in a vari­ety of gen­res (from the west­ern in El Topo to the slash­er in San­ta San­gre), and then a 23-year hia­tus from film­mak­ing, Jodor­owsky returned in 2013 with The Dance of Real­i­ty. As an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal work trac­ing the director’s child­hood in Tocopil­la, Chile, it osten­si­bly marked a change in the man’s out­put, but in fact dis­played the same spir­it of meta­phys­i­cal quest­ing found in all his pre­vi­ous works, as both the young Jodor­owsky and his father Jaime are shown under­go­ing trans­for­ma­tive jour­neys. Plus ça change…

End­less Poet­ry is both sequel and sort-of remake to The Dance of Real­i­ty, as it shows the young Jodor­owsky under­go­ing fur­ther for­ma­tive rites of pas­sage in San­ti­a­go – rites that, appar­ent­ly, nev­er real­ly end, but are mere­ly lent arbi­trary cal­i­bra­tion by clos­ing cred­its. If it picks up exact­ly where The Dance of Real­i­ty left off, with Jodor­owsky depart­ing in a boat for a new future, that is also more or less where it ends: anoth­er boat, anoth­er future, anoth­er stage in the same journey.

In this cir­cu­lar por­trait of the artist as a young man, Jodorowsky’s prin­ci­pal theme is the per­ma­nence of imper­ma­nence. Despite his past meta­mor­pho­sis, Jaime has returned to being a pet­ty patri­arch, run­ning his new lit­tle shop once more like a fas­cist régime, and hop­ing that ​‘Ale­jan­dri­to’ will become a doc­tor rather than a ​‘fag­got’ poet. Again Sara is a font of nur­tur­ing com­pas­sion, her sep­a­rate­ness from the world’s cru­el­ties and vices marked by the way that she sings her every line in a sopra­no voice.

In a fit of rebel­lious anger, Ale­jan­dro (Jodorowsky’s son, Adan) lit­er­al­ly chops down his fam­i­ly tree in the back gar­den. It is a vain attempt to sev­er domes­tic ties and branch out on his own – but he can nev­er quite shake his roots, and with his striv­ings for inde­pen­dence and change come cer­tain fixed con­ti­nu­ities. Accord­ing­ly his first lover, the poet­ess Stel­la Diáz Varín, is por­trayed by the self­same actress who plays his moth­er, while his father is played by anoth­er of his sons – and Alejandro’s fail­ure, even now, to leave behind his par­ents’ influ­ence is sug­gest­ed by the very exis­tence of two fea­ture films devot­ed to their memory.

Jodor­owsky appears as him­self again, ghost­ing his younger incar­na­tion as a guardian angel from the future, while also using this lm to stage his own psy­cho­log­i­cal flot­sam – in a Brecht­ian world where the San­ti­a­go of the past is evoked by an overt­ly set-dressed present, and black-clothed stage­hands vis­i­bly pass props to the play­ers. In this the­atre of the absurd, though, the younger Ale­jan­dro proves so supine and unen­gag­ing a char­ac­ter that a dif­fer­ent kind of end­less­ness quick­ly asserts itself.