Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) A Film by Peter Greenaway

"The history of artists working away from their homeland is rich with tales of creative flowerings: wide-eyed Paul Gauguin dispatching to Tahiti and expanding his palette, wacked-out Salvador Dalí descending on Paris to find a melting pot of artistic cross-pollination, globetrotting Orson Welles sticking it to American financiers by creating some of his most daring work in new lands, and Andrei Tarkovsky transcending both his nostalgia for his motherland and a rapidly deteriorating body with a series of deeply personal art films. Somewhere adjacent to this history is the curious case of Sergei Eisenstein's sojourn in Mexico, which serves as the subject of Eisenstein in Guanajuato." Continued at Slant Magazine.

Post Tenebras Lux (2013) A Film by Carlos Reygadas

If I needed any further proving that the rowdy, sleepless Cannes Film Festival atmosphere is no place for properly digesting challenging, multilayered art cinema, revisiting some of the 2012 festival's best international films as they've slowly trickled into American theaters in 2013 has more than done the trick. First up was Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love, the slippery surfaces and deceptively controlled structure of which struck me as intriguingly baffling at the decorated world premiere, only to make absolute, rewarding sense in the comfort of my normal routine with the luxury of much-needed time for contemplation. Holy Motors continued to be a beautifully wild, extraterrestrial object, albeit one whose layers of human sadness felt all the more acute. Now I find myself a week removed from a second screening of Carlos Reygadas' Post Tenebras Lux, the closest thing to the main competition's obligatory provocation, and the seemingly punkish assaults on viewer complacency and fiercely non-conformist gestures that gave me such a queasy feeling in the Grand Théâtre Lumière have now congealed into a cogent, expressive whole. The film still has its tangents that feel fundamentally irresolvable, but it now seems less exhibitionist in its abstraction, and more like a unit of ideas and feelings that can only be captured and arranged in this particular serpentine manner.

Reygadas is a director whose highbrow influences tend to announce themselves with regrettable bluntness, and if Silent Light was his Dreyer pastiche, Post Tenebras Lux seems a tenuous attempt at a Mexican rendition of Tarkovsky's Mirror. But like Silent Light, which was far more interesting in its departures from the Danes' tics than in its devotional quotations, Post Tenebras Lux grows more singular as the distinctive preoccupations of its maker allow surface abnormalities to protrude from an impressionistic, Mirror-like foundation (after all, Tarkovsky's inextricably autobiographical cine-poem fundamentally defies duplication). Some of Tarkovsky's main ingredients are here – a house in the middle of the forest with dark wood interiors, a dying man who is in some warped sense the protagonist, unannounced detours to the past and future, a visual appreciation of nature for its own sake – but by the time Reygadas is done with them, they produce a flavor that is nearly unrecognizable from its source.



Reprising Battle in Heaven's emphasis on class distinctions, Post Tenebras Lux flips that film's arrangement to prioritize not the Mexican working-class type but rather the wealthy, Westernized Mexican, a decision that generates an immediate critical distance. The film focuses on Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro), a casually manipulative, sexually frustrated architect living in the mountainous woodlands of Mexico with his acquiescent wife Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) and their two spirited toddlers (played by Reygadas' own children Eleazar and Rut). At the core of the film is a domestic melodrama that nearly balloons later into a class thriller, but Reygadas is much less concerned with the particulars of Juan's life than he is with his internal world, which, in a recent Cineaste interview, he admits to sympathizing with.

Western Mexicans tend to have chronic dissatisfaction and see life from a disconnected point of view...It's the reality that many people are divided in their minds between their will and action. Few people can accomplish their will. So the film is autobiographical in that sense, too, in the way that I wrote about my feelings, and it came out in an automatic and instinctive way.
-Cineaste, Summer 2013

Now, one can never be entirely certain that Reygadas doesn't beat his dogs, talk down to his underpaid laborers, and stay up all night ogling internet pornography while his wife snoozes in the adjacent room (all of which are Juan's conspicuous character flaws), but the assumption here is that thought and action have been consciously separated. The autobiographical dimension relates to Juan's psychological profile as a man disembodied from his own surroundings, longing for a simpler time free of adult obligations. His morally questionable behavior, meanwhile, suggests the troubling realities of a divided Mexico, where significant socioeconomic gaps inspire a nagging feeling of unrest, which, for Juan, leads to violence and vice. Again, the assumption is that Reygadas is critical of this behavior, but at the same time, it can be difficult to justify the film's worst, most tasteless scene, in which a Kubrickian skyward close-up frames Juan as he kneels over to pummel his disabled labrador, whose harrowing squeals "suggestively" stand in for his presence offscreen. (As an owner of a dog with a terminal impairment, there's just no excuse, aesthetic or otherwise, for this garbage.)



Aside from this stray moment (which appears to be driven by little more than Reygadas' compulsion towards provocation), Juan's actions throughout the course of the film form a plausibly contradictory individual torn by boundless love for his family and ugly entitlement. The film is smart enough to avoid suggesting that Juan is simplistically redeemed by his familial devotion or, on the contrary, that his sins taint his human potential; instead, Reygadas sidesteps the level of judgment entirely by evading the shackles of A-B narrative structure and inhabiting the schizophrenic consciousness of his lead character. The logic behind Post Tenebras Lux's grab-bag assemblage is never announced. Past, present, future, reality, and dreams are intermingled without regard for literal causation, and it's impossible to say with authority if anything onscreen at a given moment can be traced to a verifiable, diegetic source; everything is vulnerable to the faulty, distorting filter of subjectivity. There are no familiar signs of a scene's beginning and end, and no fluid transitions from scene to scene. It's like reading an essay in which there are no thesis statements or transition sentences. New ideas just arrive, unannounced and uninvited.

That's the thinking behind the film's formidable teaser, a surreal episode of Eleazar scurrying in a muddy field with horses and dogs as the woozy, distracted camerawork approximates the girl's untutored vision. Later, this scene is offhandedly justified as a dream sequence, but, with the exception of the blurry vignette which frames the shot, Reygadas' way of presenting the action avoids the usual markers of "dream language." The sounds of the animals are mixed with an almost terrifying clarity, and natural elements – wind, water, mud, and, as the scene quickly descends to night, thunder and darkness – feel tactile. This hyperrealist approach, with its emphasis on heightening the lived experience of the character and his/her physical environment, remains Reygadas' default mode even as fantastical objects and scenarios – a conspicuously unreal animated devil figure entering the family's country home in the middle of the night, a man tearing his own head off like it's a weed that needs picking – figure their way into the film.



The "WTF" moments that are scattered throughout Post Tenebras Lux arrive within longer stretches of emotional and narrative directness. They are tied, more often that not, to feelings that are genuine and visceral for the film's characters. The devil seems a byproduct of the family's wavering religious faith, as well as an omen of the troubling plot progressions to come for Juan. A (possibly metaphorical) extended sequence at a clammy French brothel – filled with the kind of unpleasant sex Reygadas' is suspiciously attracted to – stems from Juan and Natalia's admitted problems in bed and ostensible insecurity. Repeated sojourns to a seemingly arbitrary British rugby match comment obliquely on the many wars being acted out in the narrative proper (between Western and Non-Western Mexico, upper-class and lower-class, brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers); the film's final line, spoken by one of these players, is an oddly poignant gesture of optimism amidst so much prior unrest. Although these rugby scenes in particular have become a red flag for those eager to call Reygadas' out on the possibly dubious extent to which he is willing to stretch his associative montage, the results, to me at least, always feel right. The film's editing is off-kilter and strange, but rarely knotty for its own sake.

If there's anything close to a built-in retort to viewers frustrated by Post Tenebras Lux for its obscure, dawdling nature, it's Natalia's impromptu, tone-deaf version of Neil Young's "It's a Dream," which she performs on the family's out-of-tune piano at the request of her husband as he ails in bed from a violent tiff with his down-and-out employee. As this excessively civil wife tends to do, Natalia heeds Juan without question, but her ensuing performance is much more than just a half-hearted compliance with her husband's demands; it's also a headfirst dive into the bittersweet emotionality of the song's lyrics, and her eventual tears reveal a complex mixture of regret and anger over Juan's hasty decisions as well as a sincere affection for him. Only a rock could watch this and be unmoved. It's this kind of delicate, tender moment that Reygadas tends to use to bring into sharp focus the themes and emotional subtexts of a given film, and here it's pregnant with the many levels on which this chronologically jumbled, possibly liminal movie exists: the mysterious, distorted realms of dreams and the past, the fractured present, and the imposing future. As Natalia croons "it's a dream / only a dream / and it's fading now / fading away / just a memory without anywhere to stay," I found myself sharing in her sense of wistful loss – a feeling directed not towards the impending dissolution of a family and a relationship, but towards the film itself.

The Great Madcap (1949) A Film by Luis Buñuel

When Ramiro (Fernando Soler), the rich drunkard in Luis Buñuel's The Great Madcap, wakes up from an intoxicated stupor to find himself dressed in rags and surrounded by dusty, cement walls, he resembles Lon Chaney Jr. awaking to the shock of misplaced hair and fangs in The Wolf Man, or Bela Lugosi finding much to his dismay that a scientific experiment has given him thick black fur in The Ape Man, or any other B-horror character emerging in unexpected new form after a night's sleep. The only difference is that it's not hideous physical deformities that cause Ramiro's horror and disgust but rather a sudden shift in material wealth and social class, as if he had taken one wrong turn and wound up in the slums indefinitely. In the context of the film, it turns out his experience of poverty is only fleeting; he eventually discovers that his family, fearing that he might descend into alcoholic madness, has merely played a prank on him to inject some much needed doses of humility (their wanton gamesmanship is no less a trivialization of the poor). But like many of the Spanish director's bold conceits, this one has an inherently charged political connotation: the privileged bourgeoisie always possess a knee-jerk smugness towards the lower rungs in the social system, as well as a denial of the existence of economic hardship so powerful that issues of poverty might as well be a surreal fabrication.

One imagines this disorientation to have been something like the feeling Buñuel himself had when suddenly forced in the midst of public backlash following L'âge d'or to stop making features, and subsequently when he re-emerged nearly twenty years later to begin working on commercial Mexican fare. The Great Madcap is the second of these efforts (following the light musical Gran Casino) and the first to point convincingly towards Buñuel's future, even if it's a somewhat rigid and lopsided screwball comedy, a film with only fractions of the satiric bile and mad logic he dropped in L'âge d'or and would eventually unload later in his career. Hints of these tendencies are most apparent in the film's absurdly broad setup, which begins with Ramiro getting bailed out of jail and segues into his reintegration with his ungrateful family. No one in the family - not Ramiro's marriage-obsessed daughter Virginia (Rosario Granados), his spoiled son Eduardo (Gustavo Rojo), or his two scheming, deadbeat brothers Gregorio (Francisco Jambrina) and Ladislao (Andrés Soler) - has fully absorbed the impact of the recent death of Ramiro's wife, even as it's launched Ramiro himself into an alcoholic fit. They continue to shamelessly feed off of their father's wealth and resources.



During these opening scenes that establish the family and their regular routine of debauchery, Buñuel abandons subtlety in favor of wide strokes at upper-class complacency. Vignettes around the mansion include the family butler Juan justifying the theft of his Ramiro's cigars by claiming that he feared they would dry up, Eduardo pining for a new luxury car after supposedly destroying his previous one, and Ramiro fielding various requests for money. At work, Ramiro has taken to drinking in an attempt to forget his grief and has received blunt criticism from his peers for it, but his economic and professional status has allowed him to indulge regardless. In this early stage of the film, everything takes place indoors on boxy, conspicuously cheap sets, a logistical necessity that helps to emphasize the sense that the accoutrements of a wealthy lifestyle are ultimately synthetic, superficial, and fleeting; stripped suddenly of their luxuries, the family would resemble ducks with their heads cut off, totally ignorant of how to exist organically in the exterior world amongst other people. In one hilarious wide shot, Buñuel frames Ramiro and his well-dressed friends stumbling drunkenly to sappy orchestral music, the idea being that even within their familiar surroundings, they're already clueless.

The family's subsequent prank on Ramiro is therefore tinged with devilish irony, ostensibly designed to teach the patriarch human values that they themselves lack. Without the knowledge the family possesses that all will naturally return to "normal," Ramiro, after shaking off his dreamlike shock, inevitably descends into depression and makes a ridiculously botched attempt at suicide. Aiming to jump off the roof of a building in a poor district of Mexico City, he only falls a few feet before being braced by a bit of scaffolding and rescued by a construction worker named Pablo (Rubén Rojo) who insists that if he were to hit the ground from such a height it would only result in a life in a wheelchair that would arguably be worse than death. That Ramiro falls for Pablo's heroic rescue disguised as an obvious lie does little to bolster his appreciation of life and love though; soon after, when he overhears a conversation about the prank and fumes at his family's insensitivity, he responds by launching a trick of his own in which he purports to have actually lost his fortune, meanwhile continuing to live in his mansion and overseeing his family's newfound poverty. It's a mean-spirited turn of fate engineered by Ramiro that he passes off as his own attempt to teach his family members a sense of dignity and humility; the difference is that they gradually come to embrace their modest means of living, finding small sources of success and happiness.



Despite the ludicrous nature of these twists and turns, there's a fundamentally simple-minded core to The Great Madcap, an element of moralistic pandering inherent in its script that belies even Buñuel's subtle suggestions that the problems with humanity are too broad and diffuse to be reduced to class distinctions (after all, nothing proves capable of shaking the family's place in the upper-class, but their pettiness largely remains even after some breakthroughs). Buñuel sees the major issues in the film's ensemble of characters to be an absence of love and appreciation towards others and a blindness towards diversity, issues too deep-seated to be cured by loopy plot devices, but the film nevertheless implies that Ramiro's family has been taught a lesson through their involuntary hardship. Virginia, initially set upon a marriage to the wealthy Alfredo (Luis Alcoriza), changes her mind when confronted with her love for Pablo, a romance that transforms her initially narrow worldview. Pablo's near-rejection of Virginia on account of his discovery that she is in fact rich adds a blip in the streamlined nature of the film's moral, offering a lower-class attitude nearly as reductive as that of the financial elite, but it's treated merely as a momentary reaction to shock rather than a bottomless aversion to a group of people and therefore doesn't signal as the locus of Buñuel's energy in quite the same way that his skewering of privilege does. For the most part, there's a black and white dichotomy at the heart of the film that is occasionally saved by the sheer hilarity of Buñuel's investment, but otherwise threatens to reduce the film to a blunt parable.

If the script's spiral into easy moralizing is its greatest flaw, Buñuel's stiff visual style often fails to shift the attention. Some of Buñuel's stylistic tics - his method of starting a scene on a minor detail before dollying back to reveal the entire space, his habit of bunching bodies together in comical medium shot - emerge in striking ways, usually to underline the way that objects have defined the wealthy lifestyle or to emphasize the smallness and dysfunctional nature of the characters, but the film's default mode is unimaginative wide shots that exist seemingly for no other aesthetic reason than to capture all of the often busy staging in one fell swoop. (An early instance of effective camera movement and cross-cutting follows Ramiro as he makes a mess out of his daughter's wedding recital, and it's predictably one of the most dynamic scenes in the film.) But directors like Buñuel tend to couple weak decisions with convincing ones, and as such, The Great Madcap's combination of rigid studio setups and freer on-location sequences anticipating Los Olvidados' primal vérité offers a fascinating counterpoint to the more schematic choices. When we see children run through the background of a frame, it alone sends a ripple of anarchist energy through this otherwise commercially contained, if frequently funny, product.

Cannes 2012 Round-Up

Below is a complete ranking of the films I saw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Enjoy!

1. Holy Motors (Carax, France, In Competition)

When I saw Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years, Holy Motors, on the final day of rescreenings, it was by no small margin the most mysteriously beautiful, inventive film I'd seen at Cannes. Starting with the simple setup of a man working as a professional chameleon, riding a limousine stuffed to the brim with suitcases full of disguises around a serenely dreamy Paris and fulfilling different "appointments" around the city, Carax builds a multilayered meditation on performance, identity, virtual reality, and cinematic artifice. Much of the film's power comes from Denis Lavant, most deserving of the festival's "Best Actor" award, who lives each episode of the film's chronological but strangely timeless structure with the candidness and thoroughness necessary to breathe life into the film's motif of dual identities and the elusive "self". What at first seems to smell of redundancy and half-assed improvisation proves to be executed with such remarkable subtlety, grace, and precision by Carax that not a single delirious chapter - even as the director pushes Lavant to vaudevillian feats such as playing a repugnant sewer-dweller carrying an angelic Eva Mendes into his shit-stained lair, concluding with a sight-gag of Lavant's erection - feels out of place. This is a film with a fearless sense of movement and visual invention, not to mention a constant self-awareness and absurdist humor. I can't wait to see it again.

2. Journal De France (Depardon and Nougaret, France, Out of Competition/Special Screenings)

A basement full of unreleased newsreel celluloid from legendary French documentarian Raymond Depardon covering a vast range of small and large scale historical events circa the middle of the 20th century yielded the festival's most moving and poetic images. Uncovered by Depardon's wife and usual sound recordist Claudine Nougaret and positioned alongside contemporary footage of Depardon taking a photographic tour of France alone in his car, the resulting cut of Journal De France becomes a mesmerizing essay (set to killer musical cues!) on photographic truth and how images become a mirror of one's thoughts and feelings throughout the course of one's life. Yet as much as the film is a loving portrait of Depardon the artist and man, it's also, as the title suggests, a kaleidoscopic journey through France's history, its social and cultural charms, its regrettable involvement in wars, its strange political missteps (the scene of finance minister Giscard D’Estaing describing his public marketing campaign is a particular gem), and most of all, its ordinary civilians. The film's eye, like that of its primary subject, is humble, compassionate, and patient.

3. In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, In Competition)

The first time Hong Sang-soo's static camera compulsively snap-zoomed in on the action in In Another Country's extended opening shot, it's as if the entire audience experienced a collective lurch towards the actors. Perhaps this impression is just to due to my unfamiliarity with Hong's aesthetic, but in any case In Another Country provides a heightened intimacy with the filmed material, a direct relationship between director/audience and subject, and a sense of the film being conceived as it's being shot. A work so casual, spontaneous, and grounded rarely makes an appearance In Competition at Cannes, and Hong's glorious hangout of a film is all the more powerful for it. One of several films at the festival (along with Cosmopolis, Like Someone in Love, Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, In the Fog, and Moonrise Kingdom) that seemed to exist in a deserted bubble of a world comprised only of characters in the story, Hong follows Isabelle Huppert as she materializes the incomplete scenario ideas of an aspiring screenwriter (seen in the opening shot) on vacation in a South Korean beach town. The film's effortless narrative symmetry allows one to contemplate the subtle variations in the ways Huppert's three different characters are treated by a rotating cast of locals, thus providing insights into love, life, and otherness so off-the-cuff and fluid it puts shame to more heavy-handed treatments of these motifs.

4. Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, Mexico, In Competition)

The obligatory pillar of provocation this year was held up by Carlos Reygadas with his new film Post Tenebras Lux, an ambitious collage-like expression of Mexican country life that unsurprisingly garnered equal parts applause and booing. (One wonders when Cannes crowds will grow up and learn to embrace artistic license and individualistic work without resorting to knee-jerk skepticism.) Post Tenebras Lux digresses rather significantly from the comparatively sobering and linear Silent Light, but what it does share with Reygadas' previous work is its insistence upon making its audience feel something, and it put me in an unusually discomfiting space that I've rarely experienced from cinema. Despite some of its age-old arthouse ingredients (nature, animals, mechanical sex, an unforgivably extraneous scene of animal cruelty), the film is quite unlike anything ever made, and truly unique to Reygadas' sensibilities. A dark energy pulses through the film as the Mexican filmmaker never shies away from presenting conflicting emotions (family bliss and marital tension, tenderness and unexplained violence, religious devotion and paralyzing fear of the Devil) alongside each other with fervent unpredictability, giving its mystical and quasi-autobiographical musings a distinctly different tone than the otherwise structurally similar Tree of Life from last year. Though Reygadas employed the suddenly in vogue but previously extinct Academy aspect ratio (the boxy, claustrophobic 4:3), no film at Cannes felt bigger or more expansive, as its loud, immersive sound design and ghostly visuals exploded from the screen.

5. Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, Iran/Japan/France, In Competition)

I'll join the chorus of critics intrigued but somewhat baffled by Abbas Kiarostami's new Tokyo-set feature Like Someone in Love. The film is startlingly open-ended, seeming to merely capture a few episodes in the middle of a much longer narrative, and in the thick of Cannes craziness, the mental space required to mine Kiarostami's complexity is simply non-existent. Here, the director charts a similar paradigm shift roughly at the midway point as that of Certified Copy when the relationship between a young girl (Rin Takanashi) and an old man (Tadashi Okuno) shifts from prostitute/client to grandfather/granddaughter based on the innocuous misunderstanding of the girl's psychologically abusive boyfriend (Ryo Kase). The side-effect is an opaque investigation into the nature of social roles and perception, limited to a few interiors in Tokyo and several of the director's trademark car conversations. It's amazing how economical this film is, using such a small number of tense, protracted dialogue scenes to open up a vast ocean of mystery around these three characters, each of whom appear to be hiding something authentic and unfettered beneath their social façades.

6. Walker (Tsai, Taiwan/Japan, Critic's Week) A new 30-minute short by Tsai Ming-Liang entitled Walker was one of the best surprises of the festival. I'm still eagerly awaiting a new feature from the Taiwanese master, but this new work is precisely the length it needs to be. The film is decidedly, unapologetically simple, though certainly not simplistic. In it, a Buddhist monk (Tsai apostle Lee Kang-Sheng) dressed in a bright red robe walks through the hustle-bustle of Tokyo at a snail's pace to fetch a snack (this narrative detail is only revealed later in the film in an unexpected sight gag), his head perpetually facing the ground and his eyes in a meditative squint. He lifts each foot as if lifting the weight of his spirit before returning it to the ground with patience and grace. Were it not for the real-time passersby - many of whom take note of the camera's presence (adding gravitas to the performative spectacle) - one might be tempted to assume Tsai shot at a high frame-rate for slow motion. Lee's persevering slowness, his utter commitment to the act, is astonishing. Tsai shot the film himself on a digital camera with his usual frozen takes and distinctive urban framing, and the result is a remarkably pure evocation of the ghettoized pursuit of faith in the modern consumerist environment.

7. In the Fog (Loznitsa, Russia, In Competition) An extreme seriousness towards death characterizes a great deal of the best Russian cinema, and Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog joins that lineage. This 2-hour opus unwaveringly explores the rocky psychological landscape of men crawling inevitably towards a not-too-distant death, meanwhile caught between the absurd pressures of patriotism and a simple respect for human existence. On the frontiers of the German occupation, Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is wrongly accused of treason by his fellow men, and escorted out of his forest home by two Russian soldiers - Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) - to be killed. Happenstance has it that Nazi soldiers interrupt the scene of the punishment, and Burov becomes the wounded, setting the stage for an extended inquiry into the ethical dilemmas of war under a misguided regime. Loznitsa's dialogue-heavy script - set entirely within the confines of the grey and foreboding woods - often stumbles and crawls, and, in its lack of variety, clearly shows the effects of working with limited funds (this is a film that could have benefited greatly from a more palpable sense of surrounding context), but In the Fog is nonetheless the most stirringly spiritual feature of the festival.

8. Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day (Rodrigues, Portugal, Critic's Week) There's not a single horizon line visible in João Pedro Rodrigues' 30-minute short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, and it creates a powerfully destabilizing effect. Paired in a Critic's Week program with Walker, the films share a quiet observation of people walking through an urban space, but here there is an enigmatic undertone - teased out directly late in the film when one girl's Twilight Zone-esque ringtone sounds - of science-fiction and campy genre cinema that allows the images of a swarm of young adults emerging to level ground from within subway stations to suggest a kind of post-apocalyptic zombie invasion. Rodrigues covers all of the action - teenagers throwing up, keeling over inexplicably, walking into city ponds while holding up their cellphones seemingly in search of service, etc. - from vaguely aerial perspectives, bolstering the uncanny effect of the happenings. Is this a metaphor for the somnambulistic state of contemporary techno-youth, or is it just an unconventional vision of the undead traversing a posthuman landscape? The film's only press blurb is of little help: "Tradition says that on June 13th, Saint Anthony’s Day – Lisbon’s patron - lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags with popular quatrains as a token of their love." Morning of Saint Anthony's Day is an inspired oddity.

9. Amour (Haneke, France/Germany/Austria, In Competition)

Michael Haneke's Amour is an unapologetically traditional, by-the-numbers European arthouse film centering on the big themes of mortality, love, grief, family, and humiliation. Which is not to say it's fraudulent or insincere, just that it's precisely the unflinching film one would expect Haneke to make on the topic of an aging couple slowly coming to terms with death. Every formal strategy (detached wide shots, measured cutting, muted colors), narrative jolt (sudden violence, a metaphorical bird entering a French apartment), and casting decision (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert as the central family) is justified and expected, but as a Bergmanesque chamber drama it lacks the magic and complex humane treatment of Bergman. In Amour, death divides a family, and Haneke, amazingly precise as he is, can't put forth an image of postmortal hope that is very convincing, instead preferring to unceasingly pick apart the physical and psychological strain of aging and death. There's an abysmal fear in this film that's disguised as cruel realism.

10. Lawless (Hillcoat, USA, In Competition)

John Hillcoat's Lawless, previously known as The Wettest County in the World and based off the book of the same name, received some undue critical hounding after its premiere, which is strange given that it's a pretty bareknuckled and well-made Western, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, Hillcoat waters down any moral ambiguity that might have existed in the film's awkwardly schmaltzy epilogue, and the sexual landscape leans towards vaguely misogynistic, but I'll take some of these missteps over The Road's simple-minded affectations of importance and superficially "contemplative" mise-en-scène. What's more, Lawless is chock full of thrilling performances by Tom Hardy as a daftly philosophizing brute, Gary Oldman as an indifferent mobster, Guy Pearce as the slimy villain, and Shia LaBoeuf (!) in his best role as a wannabe tough guy. Still, the greatest source of my enthusiasm for the film was the immaculately dusty and contrasty cinematography of Benoît Delhomme, who shoots these Prohibition-Era ghost towns - always wafting with the smoke of whisky and brandy production - in an undeniably conventional yet painterly manner. It's a ruthlessly brutal genre movie that for quite some time maintains an air of Peckinpah-like stoicism.

11. Lawrence Anyways (Dolan, France, Un Certain Regard) Another year of inclusion in Un Certain Regard for Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan represents yet another example of the mainstream hesitance to embrace youthfulness in auteur cinema. Surely, Lawrence Anyways has more personality, and is more expressive and heartfelt, than a number of the Competition entries, and it could have added further diversity to the lineup, especially in light of its focus on social minorities (specifically a transsexual intending to remain in a heterosexual relationship). Dolan's films clearly emerge from a passionate and genuine place, and their energy and messiness is entirely the product of a spontaneous excitement for cinema. Needless to say, Lawrence Anyways is sloppy, overlong, and digressive, but the strange allure of Dolan's work is that he manages to absorb these flaws into the texture of his character's lives, discovering ways to transform self-indulgent slow-motion shots (this one has even more than Heartbeats) into gaudy expressions of a character's veiled insecurity or overblown self-importance. Like Dolan's main character, Lawrence Anyways is split between two urges: that of individuality and personal fetishism (the film's often radical compositional style and its Felliniesque eccentricities, to name two), and that of conformity (its fiery scenes of romantic turmoil featuring a revelatory Suzanne Clément and its eye-rollingly sappy denouement, both of which achieve Hollywood rom-com stature). Upon close inspection of the film's insanity, it's not too difficult to see the structural design on display.

12. The Hunt (Vinterberg, Denmark, In Competition) Thomas Vinterberg's a director with a clear interest in the secrets lurking beneath the complacent surfaces of Danish communities and families, and he's exercised that concern yet again in The Hunt, a finely wrought but quickly forgettable drama about a Kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) who is angrily cast off from his circle of friends and colleagues following the random lie of his female student (Annika Wedderkopp). There's a palpable socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure in the film's small town, as well as a solid sense of verisimilitude that must come from Vinterberg's years as a Dogme ascetic, but at the same time there's a sluggishness, a beating-around-the-bush quality to the film's narrative progression, as if Vinterberg has merely set up a troubling scenario to relish in his formidable knack for depicting societal disintegration. Furthermore, The Hunt feels too much like just a good story that was put to film, rather than a story that was expanded upon and expressed vitally through cinematic means. It's a small distinction, but it's the one that prevents Vinterberg from being as distinctive a director as he could be.

13. Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, USA, In Competition/Opening Night)

The Darjeeling Limited suggested a director trying to engage with issues broader than his own tiny universe and Fantastic Mr. Fox showcased an artist's desire to work with a new approach, but Moonrise Kingdom represents a firm step back into the confines of Wes Anderson's own headspace, and at this point the refusal to make artistic evolutions more drastic than the simple changing of a typeface and the move away from anamorphic widescreen is somewhat damning. The film feels decidedly small and inconsequential, failing to achieve the surprise emotional punch or sprawling canvas of films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Furthermore, Anderson puts the burden of the film's momentum in the hands of two unknown child actors (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) who just cannot carry a scene or portray pre-pubescent love in a convincing manner. As usual for Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom is aesthetically irreproachable, shot with an oppressively diorama-like sensitivity and production designed to fantastical perfection, but it puts its eggs in the wrong basket narratively, all while wasting the naturally Andersonian flair of Anderson newcomers Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. My love for Anderson aside, and despite a hilariously overblown climax that utilizes some throwback color toning, Moonrise Kingdom is a frustratingly flimsy act of regression from this important American filmmaker.

14. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, USA, In Competition)

The humid theater it screened in was of no help to David Cronenberg's already-stuffy Cosmopolis, the experience of which was akin to being suffocated by the director as he whispered his esoteric contemporary philosophies in your ear. Well, more precisely, Robert Pattinson, who has become the inert mouthpiece for Cronenberg's meandering and impenetrable dialogues on the current state of economics and politics. It's clear enough that this is the story of the 1%, but I'll admit total confusion and ignorance towards the remainder of Cronenberg's intentions, and I'm certainly not prepared or interested in trying to shuffle through the needlessly coded meanings in this never-ending string of talk. Intellectual detachment is all well and good though if Cronenberg were at least able to present his ideas in compelling cinematic fashion (hence the success of Like Someone in Love) rather than resorting to what feels like characters reading manuscripts to each other in a black box theater. The outside world is so closed-off and pared-down in Cosmopolis that it's as if any of Cronenberg's decisions apart from the dialogue (the NYC location, Pattinson's plot-churning desire for a crosstown haircut, the rat as a symbol of the deteriorating dollar) were arrived at arbitrarily. Add to this the flat digital cinematography and Cosmopolis is just a dull, unimaginative slog of a film.

15. The Paperboy (Daniels, USA, In Competition)

Ok, at least Lee Daniels dropped the wacked-out racial hierarchy of the abominable Precious, but in its wake he's yielded a frankly incompetent, meaningless, and misguided tribute to the low-budget homespun camp cinema of the film's 1960's era, and he's traded the revolting view of inner-city blacks in the previous film for stereotypes of southern white trash in this one. Surely, The Paperboy aims for ickiness, but to what end? In a climactic sex scene between recently-released criminal Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) and blonde bombshell Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), Daniels cuts to images of livestock as a punctuation mark, as if deriding his characters' baseless behavior. As much as the film tries to approach a sympathetic note for its depraved characters in the end, for the most part it rides this reprehensive wave throughout, and it presents it all in a psychosexual storm of bad editing and crummy lighting. Zac Efron stumbles away with some surprisingly nuanced acting as a detective's (Matthew McConaughey) younger brother and a man struggling with overwhelming physical desire for an Kidman's older character, but otherwise the cast appears confused, seemingly lost in Daniels' inexact mise-en-scène, unaware of whether or not the cameras are rolling. This is a profoundly awful film.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) A Film by Tommy Lee Jones

Haunted by the ghosts of Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, Tommy Lee Jones' only theatrical feature to date, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is a strange, uneven neo-western whose slim storyline is often held together only by an overwhelming vision of the West as a place of collapsing moral fiber and dissolving identity. Jones directs himself as the paunchy, mumbly ranch hand Pete Perkins from the desolate town of Van Horn, Texas, and Perkins' modus operandi throughout the film is to quietly, insistently preserve a tradition of moral responsibility and human empathy in his dull border town, where multicultural tensions flare up regularly. Policeman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) is at the center of his town's bigotry, a volatile figure who spends his days chasing "wetbacks" through the dusty Texas landscape and indifferently disrobing his bored wife Lou Ann (January Jones) in unlikely domestic spaces. Pepper's one-note performance does little to disguise the fact that he's the loud caricature of the narrow-minded American authority, and much of the film's issues lie in its simplistic staging of the American way of life, which is boiled down to "fucking billboards," prostitution, emotional distance, and ugliness. Unsurprisingly, given the authorial one-two punch here - Jones and notoriously heavy-handed writer Guillermo Arriaga - Mexico embodies a sacred land in the film's universe.

As such, the film's plot works to reinforce that image of unshakeable nationalism. Hinging on the sudden, sporadic killing of Perkins' friend and colleague Melquiades Estrada (Julio César Cedillo), Arriaga then weaves a structure around the three separate burials of Melquiades' corpse, the first two of which are considered rash and unholy by Perkins. Simple enough, it seems, but Arriaga insists on fracturing the chronology a bit to insure that viewers witness the banal death of Melquiades from more than one perspective. The third burial is Perkins' attempt to offer the proper closure to Melquiades' spirit, and it involves him kidnapping Norton, forcing him to dig up the body, and escorting both the body and a hand-cuffed Norton across the border to seek an ideal resting place. Perkins enacts the whole affair with a yawning tenacity, not necessarily vengeful in his justice but exhaustedly adhering to his own sense of spiritual and moral duty.

The character gives Jones a comprehensive workout in the kind of gruff but oddly gentle, outdoorsy conservatism that his screen persona has so often imparted within Hollywood in recent years. Perkins feels very much like the rough draft of Ed Tom Bell in the Coens' No Country for Old Men, with the weary stares and interior digressions of that character echoed here in more primitive forms. Part of this incompleteness has to do with the film's shoddy sound mix, which subsumes voices into the static drone of the West, but it also stems from the generally paltry writing and directorial development. The film relies on its audience buying the close bond between Pete and Melquiades in order to succumb to the act of brotherhood that occurs in the second half, but the script only allows the two characters a couple of clipped, aimless scenes together, hoisted on the assumption that sharing afternoon hookers is enough to signal immutable friendship. Moreover, Jones spends more time hovering over Norton and his vile police companion Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) during the first half of the film than he does any of the more interesting and ostensibly primary characters. Nonetheless, even in the absence of the glue that would make Perkins a complete character, Jones still comes across as an element unto himself, a tired patriarch once shown respect and admiration and now merely a ghost roaming in his own territory.

The first half of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada owes something to Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show as a postmodern homage to the small-town rhythms of early Westerns by Ford and Hawks. Jones aims to capture the lazy routines of Van Horn, limiting the scale to a few classic locations and a rotating cast of townies. Sometimes, as when the camera rests on January Jones' frustrated and adrift beauty in the local diner (shot in a grotesque shade of blue and uncomfortably overexposed), or when macho camaraderie is established at the police station, the film casually develops an internal flow, but other times Jones seems to be roped in by Arriaga's gimmicky suspense-building maneuvers, which actually stomp out the director's attempt to get on the town's wavelength. Free of the script's needless devices in the second half, Jones strays from Bogdanovich to settle into a patchwork, nearly stream-of-consciousness trip through Mexico to bury Melquiades. The body decays (the resulting corpse's gloriously low-rent production values allows it to stand in as a symbol of death rather than a specific person), and surrealism starts to creep in. Jones appears at ease with the kind of loose linearity that this chapter offers him, unsurprising for a man whose default gaze is a tired, no-nonsense one that stares incessantly forward. As the sun-baked march coalesces and begins to turn the bad guy good, Levon Helm arrives for a haunting cameo as a blind man living alone on his porch in Mexico, with nothing to do but listen to the radio sullenly now that his son has died over the border. A professed Bible adherent, the man requests that Perkins kill him for fear that God might disapprove of suicide.

Helm only returns to the film in a punctuational close-up shortly thereafter, and it's too bad that his moment does not last longer. His character underscores a devastating moral ambiguity that only hovers over the film tangentially, hinting at a full emergence in the last act but ultimately a minor subtext. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, instead, seems confused about its intentions, doubling as a preachy argument for multicultural tolerance as well as a more nuanced look at the tensions between old-world and new-world codes of justice. Jones needs a screenwriter to match his archaic sensibilities, not a guy known for his loopy manipulations to admittedly simple stories. It's no surprise that the film is at its most strangely compelling when it's sliding amorphously through a hallucinatory Mexican landscape like the drunk in Under the Volcano; like the best of Jones' performances, these moments carry a relaxed but undeniably melancholy air. The rest is more suited, well, to a performance like Pepper's.

Santa Sangre (1989) A Film by Alejandro Jodorowsky

For all its admittedly surreal flourishes and bonkers left-turns, Santa Sangre is actually provocateur Alejandro Jodorowsky's least anarchic film (if we take his disowned The Rainbow Thief out of the picture), for within its hysterical madness there is a traceable, if lopsided, psychosexual transformation, a personal coming-of-age odyssey that makes just enough sense when placed within Freudian and Jungian tenets. Because of this, it's also his most satisfying and complete work, rarely falling victim to overlong displays of wild debauchery. His chaos-stuffed 1973 hit The Holy Mountain still remains my favorite, if only for the dazzling nature of its imagery, but as narrative, as (dare I say) drama, Santa Sangre delights and confounds in equal measure. This is not to suggest, of course, that the film is the least bit conventional in its wayward approach to storytelling. Rather, it strands itself from plausible reality at every turn, depicting the turbulent upbringing and post-traumatic complexes of Fenix (Adan and Axel Jodorowsky, the director's sons) - the son of a heinous ringmaster named Orgo (Guy Stockwell) and an overbearing sacrilegious fanatic/trapeze performer named Goncha (Blanca Guerra) - with elliptical verve and inscrutable diversions.

Starting with an image of a barbaric grown-up Fenix hidden away in an asylum, the film quickly and unexpectedly gestures backward to tell the story of the Circo del Gringo, the family's lurid circus that is essentially Fellini magnified and made extra grotesque. There Orgo, plump and drooling, flings knives at a woman (Thelma Tixou) covered head-to-toe with tattooes, a dangerous spectacle made erotic by the woman's histrionic expressions of sexual pleasure every time a soaring knife shimmies between her upper thighs or beside her lip. Meanwhile, Goncha struggles to maintain her Santa Sangre (translated as "Holy Blood") sanctuary, where her and a mass of supporters are convinced that the pool of red paint in the middle of the room is actually the blood of the cult's patron saint, a young girl whose arms were cut off by her two brothers before her death. Fenix is caught within an oppressive marital tension between Orgo and Goncha caused by Orgo's routine sexual finagling with the tattooed woman while also harboring feelings of romantic attraction to the tattooed woman's deaf-mute daughter Alma (Faviola Elenka Tapia), a circus performer whose physical ailments and genuinely human demeanor throughout make her the film's truly innocent sympathetic figure. But Fenix and Alma, in an affecting scene underscored by Jodorowsky's iconic compositions, are drawn apart indefinitely after Goncha, in a fit of rage, pours acid on the genitalia of the tattooed woman and Orgo, who responds by promptly cutting off her arms.

Santa Sangre's character conflicts operate in such a way throughout. Although the motivations behind the actions are more or less clear, the punishments enacted stretch any inkling of reason or verisimilitude. Certainly an acid attack is not the cleanliest or most reliable form of murder, and certainly Orgo's violent outbreak is a bit over-the-top in its execution, but Jodorowsky deliberately makes it so in order to align Goncha's traumas with that of her saint's, to give the film the fanatical religious and mystical thrust that all his film's incorporate and subsequently deconstruct. Furthermore, it's quite simply because Jodorowsky revels in the terrain of baroque overstatement; when his characters are angry, they get very angry, and the same goes for sensations of happiness, sexual excitement, and horror. All these elemental emotions are in feisty competition in Jodorowsky's work, making them rather turbulent experiences that are difficult to engage with emotionally. But Santa Sangre includes exalted occasions when the kaleidoscopic tone collage comes to a steady halt, leaving in its wake scenes of rich emotional poetry, such as the harrowing devastation of Goncha after her Church is bulldozed and Fenix comforts her, or the plaintive and inevitable farewell of Fenix and Alma, which feels like a missed opportunity until the two reunite later in an equally lovely scene of romantic swooning. For all his cinematic nihilism, Jodorowsky is unusually sensitive in his depiction of these perversely relatable scenes by visually matching the respective emotions, like when his camera swoops under and spins around Fenix and Alma during their uplifting kiss.



By the time Fenix is older, the raunchy traumas of circus life prove to have made an indelible mark on his psyche. Living in a nuthouse with mentally disabled, cocaine-snorting inmates and a guard who treats him like a child, Fenix is all of a sudden called upon by his mother in the alley adjacent to his cell. The subsequent shot of the two of them trotting wearily into a cloud of smoke at the end of the street is a succinct visualization of the foreboding experiences ahead for Fenix under the false promise of motherly support. Goncha enlists her son as her sidekick in a peculiar theatrical show in which he stands behind her and acts out the movements indicated by her words with his arms, which are squeezed through her costume to suggest one person. It grows increasingly disturbing when the goings-on at the theater start to mirror the circus, with Fenix, perhaps against his own conscious will, enacting on a voluptuous fellow performer his father's sexualized knife routine. The moment Goncha has any sneaking suspicion of her son being attracted to a woman (likely indebted to her husband's consistent infidelity), she begins living vicariously through him, ordering his hands to stab and murder the various females. Gorily, theater and life coexist, and in the process Fenix's oedipal complex is strengthened.

The film's batty final act is somewhat unbalanced in its trajectory (quite literally when Jodorowsky's camera starts careening from one dutch tilt to another in the climax), and it contains a few too many subplots from left field (Fenix's admiration of James Whale's 1933 film The Invisible Man is a particular head-scratcher), but it all coalesces into an awesomely zany fit of Gothic horror not unlike the work of Italian directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Whether the presence of producer Claudio Argento (Dario's younger brother) rubbed off on him or whether Jodorowsky earnestly sees shocking horror as the natural conclusion of a man's motherly dependence is a curiosity better left ambiguous, because the finale's loopy, ugly, claustrophobic, and ultimately sublime beauty makes up for the rest of the film's often clumsy discursiveness. When the newly anointed grown-up versions of Fenix and Alma (Sabrina Dennison) wander outside the crime scene into police headlights and are forced to raise their hands to the sky, it's bracing and almost mysterious how effectively the metaphor of letting go of the past and regaining one's identity works. Santa Sangre is one big elaborate allegory for these themes, and it's a miracle that despite its seemingly outlandish countenance it has such conviction behind its sentiments.

Silent Light (Stellet Licht) A Film by Carlos Reygades (2008)

Silent Light starts and ends with a sunrise and sunset, a monumentally simple concept that surprisingly has never once, to my knowledge, been exercised in a film. The two shots are undeniably sublime, protracted glances at the beauty of our world, and create something akin to the curtains opening and closing in the theater, a mere blink of the world's eye that exposes an age-old tale underneath it in the Mennonite community the film is set in. Director Carlos Reygades is unafraid to allow something so ordinary to grace the screen for an extended period of time, and in this refusal, demands the hushed attention such a cosmic act of nature deserves. His camera begins pirouetting through the starry night sky, eventually spiraling towards the ground and finishing with a languorous dolly in between two silhouetted trees, revealing the expansive sky as a slowly evolving amalgam of vibrant red and yellow paint. Accompanying it is the amplified buzzing of cicada bugs and the soft purr of the dawn wind. The shot's coda is essentially a reversal of the first one, and it is one of the most satisfying, visually orgasmic finales a film can offer, an aurora-borealis-like sight that accounts for one of the finest moments in contemporary cinema. These two shots contain enough wonder for an entire film, and I would have called it a masterpiece had they been the only components of Silent Light. The bleak moral play that exists within the remainder is, in this line of sight, somewhat of an addendum, enough to make a strong piece of pure cinema to be sure, even improved by the confounding impression that the opening leaves over, but it can be tedious.

The film chronicles an austerely, but not explicitly, religious man named Johan who is juggling two women in his life, a rather surprising fact considering the rigidity of the community. The Mennonites are settled in the Northern tip of Mexico, speak a German dialect called Plautdietsch, and adhere to liturgical activities in their withdrawn village, a place where the sounds of spoons upon bowls seem to reverberate for miles. Following the opening sequence, we see a silent family in prayer before a table of food and only hear the loud ticking of a clock in the background, which is trailed by a shot of a shiny disc on the clock that reflects the whole family. Immediately, Reygades also presents the village as a place where the slog of time is far more relevant to life, a characteristic that it shared with its festival companion, Times and Winds; each second that clicks by, it seems that emotions are magnified. Representing Johan's past lover but established partner is his wife Esther, a somber woman who cares for the pair's children and is well aware of Johan's admitted adultery with Marianne, another woman in the community with some physical similarities who genuinely feels bad for Esther. Johan feels some grief over his crisis, evidenced by the number of times Reygades patiently observes his weeping, but also believes that God has chosen a path for him to be with Marianne. He clearly still harbors much love for Esther, but his physical and emotional desire for Marianne is overwhelming, a notion he makes perfectly clear to his preacher father. Johan's struggle is universal - the difficulty to resolve one's polarized romantic feelings - but his method of dealing with it is certainly unusual. Esther makes her despair known in the climactic scene (staged traditionally in accordance with climate), first accusing Marianne of being a "damn whore" and then lamenting the past when her relationship with Johan was functional. The love triangle is an extremely unconventional one, with Marianne in complete understanding of Esther's turmoil, Johan unfazed by his dishonorable acts, and Esther repressive with her disapproval.



Carlos Reygades is a director whose first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, were both stylistic originals but nonetheless did little to foreshadow the ascetic, contemplative tone of Silent Light. The film's visual palette is representative of both Tarkovsky and, more presently, Lisandro Alonso. Each time Reygades establishes a scene with a wide shot, that wide shot lasts much longer than one might expect, and eventually, after tracking into the scene creepily, it becomes the shot for the entire scene. This is most mysteriously displayed when Johan visits a friend at his garage and the interior is pitch black until the camera enters completely. Also, the camera will perform the equivalent of Ozu's "pillow shots", only for Reygades, they frequently come during the middle of a scene. For example, when Johan and Esther are driving through inundant rain, the camera cuts away from their conversation inside the car - which always includes only one of them in the frame at once to suggest their spiritual disconnection - to follow on the dirt road at a distance before returning. There are also observational pauses in the story when we just view the family bathing outdoors or Esther driving a tractor through the wheat fields. For the first thirty minutes or so, this rhythm is tiring, but once Johan's crisis is learned, the film accumulates herculean force. In many ways, Silent Light is a riff on Dreyer's Ordet, except without such a blatant fixation on the religious strain. This is most evident in an exactly congruent denouement that acts as somewhat of a resolution to Johan's crisis and a justification of Marianne's earlier, and likely true, statement: "Peace is stronger than love." Whether this is an "homage" to Dreyer or a ripoff is in question, because there is a sense that Reygades uses the scene in the same affirming manner. Despite this though, the scene's power within the film is unquestionable, as are the other 145 minutes of elemental, authentic filmmaking. Silent Light is an assured film that uses the beautiful perplexity of nature to compliment and bookend the fragile frameworks of love and faith.

Fando Y Lis (1968) A Film by Alexandro Jodorowsky

Cult surrealist Alexandro Jodorowsky's debut film Fando Y Lis caused riots upon its release in 1968, and subsequently became lost for 30 years. It's discovery is a crucial step in getting a full Jodorowsky triple whammy, when placed alongside 1970's El Topo and 1973's The Holy Mountain. The film is the initial signs of blasphemous life (save his previous short film La Cravate) from one of cinema's most insane provocateurs. Jodorowsky's characteristically mythic storytelling - kitschy imaginings of the ancient etchings which his films often form their shape around (in Fando Y Lis' case, the opening credits closely resemble the graphics that open Zelda: Windwaker) - involves a hapless couple, both of whom have survived bizarre childhoods, traversing the world's rubble in search of the spiritual city of "Tar". "Tar" promises spiritual ecstasy, as it's the last remaining city after all were destroyed, and eternal happiness for the damaged (and in fact never even translucent) relationship of Fando and Lis.

Their trip is relentlessly burdened by ludicrous freak-shows that rummage through the rocky landscape and a sadomasochistic rivalry that always trumps the borders of reality. As the film progresses, the two sink further and further into madness, as Lis' desperate cries for Fando (which recall Gelsomina's for Zampano in Fellini's La Strada) become more and more inane. A laundry list of sight gags is available in Fando Y Lis, and as with most of Jodorowsky's work, attempting to commit to language the breadth of visual originality present in his preposterously hilarious images would most certainly ruin the indescribable feelings they evoke. Here his camera style is at its most primordial; the overexposed, high contrast black and white hand-cam shots differ greatly from some of the eye-popping cinematographic calculation that emblazoned The Holy Mountain, but one can still sense Jodorowsky's presence behind the camera. There are his obtuse zooms, bird's eye view observations, and deliberately nonrhythmic edits. Not to mention the soundtrack, while naturally rougher around the edges than in his later work, is typically contradictory and irritating (a peaking track of what sounds like a cluster of buzzing bees accompanies a scene involving elderly woman at a dinner table aside the dusty environment).

Although Jodorowsky throws several ideas together in tangled webs in his films (in Fando Y Lis, there is a generous helping of elementary symbols such as eggs or white ponies), there tends more often than not to be a coherent schema. The city of "Tar" seems to have the general notion of a utopia, or a God, but throughout the film it is unattainable, much like "The Holy Mountain" is. Lis even states in optimism, "If Tar does not exist, then we'll invent it". Jodorowsky's films function as elaborate methods of pushing aside humanity's profound claims, so that one can attempt to enjoy the wonder and absurdity of life that already is ubiquitous. Whether Jodorowsky took beaver tranquilizers while directing his films or not, there is an undeniable wealth of imagination that imbues his unceasingly wacky world.