Santa Sangre
Mexico-Italy (1989): Horror/Thriller
Roger Ebert Review: 4.0 stars out of 4
118 min, Rated NC-17, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc
SANTA SANGRE is a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers
had bold individual visions and were not timidly trying to duplicate the
latest mass-market formulas. This is a movie like none I have seen before,
a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and
Fellini. It contains blood and glory, saints and circuses, and unspeakable
secrets of the night. And it is all wrapped up in a flamboyant parade of
bold, odd, striking imagery, with Alejandro Jodorowsky as the ringmaster.
Those who were going to the movies in the early 1970s will remember the
name. Jodorowsky is the perennial artist in exile who made EL TOPO, that
gory cult classic that has since disappeared from view, trapped in a legal
battle. Then he made THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, another phantasmagoric collection
of strange visions, and in recent years he has written a series of fantasy
comic books which are best-sellers in France and Mexico. Now he is back with
a film that grabs you with its opening frames and shakes you for two hours
with the outrageous excesses of his imagination.
The film takes place in Mexico, where the hero, Fenix, travels with his
father's circus. His father is a tattooed strongman, and his mother is an
aerialist who hangs high above the center ring, suspended from the long
locks of her hair. She is also a mystic who leads a cult of women who
worship a saint without arms - a woman whose arms were severed from her body
during an attack by a man. The blood of this saint is santa sangre, holy
blood, collected in a pool in a church which the authorities want to
bulldoze.
The church is pulled down in the opening moments of the movie, while
horrendous events take place under the big top. While the mother is
suspended from her hair high in the air, she sees her husband sneak out with
the tattooed lady - and she tracks them down to their place of sin, kills her,
and maims her husband with acid before he cuts off her arms and then kills
himself.
Or is that what actually happened? The young son, who witnesses these deeds,
is discovered years later in an insane asylum, sitting up in a tree,
refusing all forms of human communication. Then he receives a visitor - his
mother, come to deliver him from his madness. When he re-enters the outer
world, he encounters Alma, the deaf-mute girl who was his childhood friend,
and who has now grown into a grave, calm young woman. And he embarks on a
journey that leads into the most impenetrable thickets of Freudian and
Jungian symbology.
Fenix's mother, still without arms, makes him her psychological slave. He
must always walk and sit behind her, his arms thrust through the sleeves of
her dresses, so that his hands do her bidding. Together they perform in a
nightclub act - she sitting at the piano, he playing. But is this really
happening, or is it his delusion?
Jodorowsky hardly pauses to consider such questions, so urgent is his
headlong rush to confront us with more spectacle. I will never forget one
sequence in the movie, the elephant's burial, where the circus marches in
mournful procession behind the grotesquely large coffin of the dead animal.
It is tipped over the side into a garbage dump, where the coffin is pounced
upon and ripped open by starving scavengers. Another powerful image comes in
a graveyard, where the spirits of female victims rise up out of their graves
to confront their tormentor. And there is the strange, gentle, almost
hallucinatory passage where Fenix joins his fellow inmates in a trip into
town; Jodorowsky uses mongoloid children in this sequence, his actors
communicating with them with warmth and body contact in a scene that treads
delicately between fiction and documentary.
If Jodorowsky has influences - in addition to the psychologists he plunders
for complexes - they are Fellini and Bułuel. Federico Fellini, with his love
for grotesque and special people and his circuses and parades, and Luis
Bułuel, with his delight in depravity and secret perversion, his conviction
that respectability was the disguise of furtive self-indulgence. SANTA
SANGRE is a movie in which the inner chambers of the soul are laid bare, in
which desires become visible and walk into the room and challenge the
yearner to possess them.
When I go to the movies, one of my strongest desires is to be shown
something new. I want to go to new places, meet new people, have new
experiences. When I see Hollywood formulas mindlessly repeated, a little
something dies inside of me: I have lost two hours to boors who insist on
telling me stories I have heard before. Jodorowsky is not boring. The
privilege of making a film is too precious to him, for him to want to make
a conventional one. It has been eighteen years since his last work, and all
of that time the frustration and inspiration must have been building. Now
comes this release, in a rush of energy and creative joy.
Santa Sangre
Mexico-Italy (1989): Horror/Thriller
CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Review: 3.0 stars out of 5
118 min, Rated NC-17, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc
Admittedly, director Alejandro Jodorowsky's first film in 10 years and only
his third since his notorious 1971 debut, the surrealist western EL TOPO,
SANTA SANGRE is nearly a decade out of step. Although obviously not for
every taste, SANTA SANGRE is, however, a film that no adventurous moviegoer
can afford to miss. Despite the film's surrealist trappings, parody is at
the heart of this effort. Unfortunately, Jodorowsky chooses to parody
oedipal slasher films, which long ago slipped into the realm of self-parody
(especially the latter installments in the series that began with FRIDAY THE
13TH, 1980), if, indeed, they were ever intended to be taken seriously.
Synopsis
Sanitarium patient. SANTA SANGRE begins with a brief scene involving a
Christ-like nude perched on a tree limb in what appears to be the cell of a
sanitarium. A doctor and nurses arrive with food: a conventional dinner and
a plate of raw fish. It's the fish, of course, that brings the man down from
his perch. While the doctor and nurses coax him into overalls, an elaborate
tattoo of an eagle is revealed on the young man's chest. The film promptly
flashes back to tell the story behind the tattoo as well as the story behind
the young man's present state.
Childhood revealed:
As a youngster, Fenix (played as a child by Jodorowsky's son Adan
Jodorowsky, then as an adult by his elder son, Axel) is billed as the
world's youngest magician. He performs his act for the Circus del Gringo,
run by his womanizing father, Orgo (Guy Stockwell), and his mother, Concha
(Blanca Guerra), a crazed religious fanatic. Fenix is assisted in his act by
an ethereal deaf-mute girl, who always wears white-face makeup, and with
whom he is falling in puppy love. To initiate Fenix into manhood his father
painstakingly (and painfully) carves the eagle tattoo into the boy's chest.
But Fenix's life takes an even more traumatic turn when Concha, enraged by
her husband's latest infidelity (with the circus's curvaceous tattooed lady,
the deaf-mute's mother), interrupts the adulterers in bed, and attacks
Orgo's genitals with acid. Orgo, a knife thrower, retaliates with the tools
of his trade, slicing off Concha's arms before slitting his own throat.
Having been locked in his trailer by Concha, Fenix must then watch
helplessly as the tattooed lady and her daughter disappear into the night
following the bloodbath.
Vengeful adult:
Back in the present, Fenix, on a field trip with his fellow patients, spots
the tattooed lady, now a drunken prostitute, and is consumed with rage.
Coaxed into escaping from the sanitarium by the armless Concha, Fenix
becomes her vengeful "hands," both in a bizarre nightclub act and in an orgy
of murder that only begins with his skewering of the tattooed lady.
Fenix's later victims include a hardened, drug-addicted stripper who becomes
a virginal, coquettish schoolgirl onstage, and a wrestler, the "world's
strongest woman," who fights off a small army of male wrestlers in her act.
Difficult decision:
The film's climax is brought about by the reappearance of the deaf-mute
girl, now grown up (played by deaf actress Sabrina Dennison). Fenix is
stirred to revolt when Concha orders him to kill this beautiful young woman,
his former love, just as he has killed all the other women who have brought
confusion into his life.
Critique--Mixed success:
SANTA SANGRE could hardly be described as boring. Moreover, gorgeously
photographed and crammed with the startling imagery for which Jodorowsky is
justly famed, the film is never less than visually beautiful . It also
boasts a splendidly effective cast, even if Axel Jodorowsky is a dead
ringer, both in looks and acting style, for Bronson Pinchot. Yet the film
can't help but remain stubbornly earthbound because of its derivative,
pedestrian scenario, too-obviously bearing the influence of its producer,
Claudio Argento, the younger brother of splashy Italian horror specialist
Dario Argento. Whether SANTA SANGRE would have been a better film had it
been more purely Jodorowsky's work is debatable.
The surrealist interludes here recall Bułuel, but never attain an identity
of their own. If anything, they come across as calculated and
intellectualized in a way that is almost the antithesis of Bułuel's
instinctual approach. Still, if Jodorowsky is not yet worthy of inclusion in
the pantheon with Bułuel and Hitchcock (the latter can be either credited
with or blamed for starting the oedipal-slasher trend with PSYCHO, 1960), he
is, nonetheless, in a class by himself.
