Endless Poetry review: the surreal deal from the master Jodorowsky

As with everything Jodorowsky has ever made, or indeed said, watching Endless Poetry – the second instalment of a planned series of five cinematic memoirs – one is never quite sure what is truth, or allegory, or Freudian musing, or the result of too much mescaline during the 1960s.

We pick up where The Dance of Reality left off: young Alejandro (played by Alejandro's grandson Adan) is a teenager in Santiago in the 1950s, whose penchant for the poetry of Federico García Lorca brings him into conflict with his Stalinesque father (played by Alejandro's son, Brontis). His opera singing mother despairs when her only son chops down the family tree.

But a bohemian life and sexual awakening – notably sex with a menstruating dwarf and an experimental kiss with a homosexual cousin – awaits. His first love, an ill-defined, scarlet-haired, underground performer, is so taken with him that she promises that: “Every time we walk together. I will keep hold of your private parts.” The woman is as good as her word.

At 89, there’s no one like Jodorowsky left in cinema. His oeuvre is often described as Fellini-esque, but the late Italian master never wandered into the frame to add his own footnotes.

If you haven’t already fallen for Jodorowsky’s psycho-magic, then Endless Poetry – which opens with a midget dressed as Hitler declaring war on high prices – is unlikely to win you over. This may be one of Jodorowsky’s easier, more accessible works, but it’s still arthouse with a capital ‘a’, making few concessions to conventional plotting and devices.

As we've come to expect from the director who once tethered Rafael Corkidi – his cinematographer on Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain - carnivalesque images are counterpointed by still, unfussy framing.

We are not worthy of Jodorowsky: we never have been.