The Dance of Reality review: another spectacular flourish from the psycho-magician

Young Alejandro (Jeremías Herskovits) lives with his Jewish-Ukrainian Stalin-alike father Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky) and opera-singing, spell-casting mother Sara (Pamela Flores) in Tocopilla, Chile. The boy is soon wrenched from childhood when the tyrannical Jaime decides to make a man of his offspring: he begins by removing the blonde curls that once belonged to his maternal grandfather, slaps the boy until his tooth breaks, then takes him for dental work without anaesthetic.

Jaime’s parenting is interrupted by a plot to assassinate the right-wing president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (Bastian Bodenhofer), a scheme that sees him become groom to the president’s beloved horse, Bucephalus.

And that's when The Dance of Reality gets really strange.

Where to begin with self-styled ‘psycho-magician’ Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest curveball? If you see only one film featuring genital-torturing Nazis this year...? Have you heard about the movie with a limbless army?

For fans of Jodorowsky's unique brand of magic surrealism, this carnivalesque "autobiography" fizzes with discombobulating spectacle: midget clowns, skull-headed mourners and transvestite communists lurk in every scene. There are delightfu1 reminders of the films that made Jodorowsky the maestro of midnight movies during the late-1970s: many minor characters recall the Tarot-like population of Holy Mountain (1973) and there's a brief return to a circus not unlike the one found in Santa Sangre (1989).

For all the phantasmagoria, the director’s eighth feature since 1957 improbably maintains its strange through-narrative, with some assistance from Jodorowsky himself, who occasionally wanders into shot to say things like “Money is like Christ”.

Cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou and the director’s vast imagination do much to compensate for a lower budget – an unbelievable $3 million – than the master might have had back in the day. It probably helped that the family pitched in: wife Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky made the fabulous costumes, son Adan Jodorowsky composed the playful score, and son Brontis dazzles in the central role.

The Dance of Reality is at Triskel Christchurch, Cork from Friday, January 30th to Monday, February 2nd