Santa Sangre

SANTA SANGRE
(1989)
Dir - Alejandro Jodorowsky
Overall: GREAT
 
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a filmmaker unlike other filmmakers.  In fact, he does not consider himself a filmmaker in the commercial sense, instead labeling himself an artist who happens to make movies when he has something to make.  He has stated that he puts his entire soul, his entire being into his films and feels depleted afterwards, at which point he needs to experience life more to find whatever ideas are out there to put on celluloid again.  Jodorowsky has also stated that he does not make movies from his intellect but from his unconscious, opening himself up to the moment and following the muse into whatever wild avenues it takes him.  He is a filmmaker, (or, we should say, an ARTIST), that is in tune with a type of boundless imagination that makes his work singular and stimulating.  No one makes movies like him, no one makes art like him, and because of that, we have a film like Santa Sangre that no one else could have delivered.

 

It is interesting to note that as textbook Jodorowsky as Santa Sangre is, he did not birth the script for it initially.  It was in fact brought to him by producer Claudio Argento who developed the story with screenwriter Roberto Leoni, the latter inspired by his time spent working in the library of a psychiatric hospital where he had first hand contact with those suffering from debilitating mental illness.  This may seem like a place of tragedy for such a concept to emerge, but Leoni discovered something unexpected and uplifting in his time spent there, coming across people who had violent thoughts yet were able to suppress them.  When Argento and Leoni then contacted and met with Jodorowsky, (who both wisely considered to be the best man for the job), something serendipitous occurred.  While working as a cartoonist from his long downtime between projects, (Santa Sangre would be his first movie in nearly a decade), Jodorowsky has claimed to have met the infamous Mexican serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández by chance, learning that the former murderer had become fully rehabilitated and was living as a free man with a family and a law degree.  Thus a spark was fired, and Jodorowsky was able to contribute his own concepts to Leoni's story, concepts which ran parallel in taking a sympathetic approach to someone committing heinous acts.

 

Jodorowsky: A man inspired.

Having worked with his famous brother Dario consistently, Argento was sticking with what he knew, wanting to make a movie where a lot of women were brutally murdered on screen.  He settled for only two, as well as a musclebound man in drag, but more on that later.  Despite Argento having more of an exploitative agenda, Leoni and Jodorowsky's collaborative finished screenplay offered up something that steered clear of mere misogynistic violence.  It instead went into psychological terrain while humanizing the perpetrator of such violence, which was ideally suited to Jodorowsky's penchant for exploring the unconscious and putting an endless stream of wacky and, (if need be), controversial images on screen.

 

In Santa Sangre, we get a Folk Catholic cult who worships an armless girl that was raped and murdered while baptizing themselves in a pool of sacred blood.  We get an elaborate funeral procession for an elephant which is ritualistically dumped into a quarry where hundreds of local scavengers excitingly rip apart the carcass for its meat.  We get an overweight, drunkard, adulterer, hypnotist knife-thrower who gets sulfuric acid poured on his genitals by his wife when caught in the act with a fully tattooed woman, at which point he slices off the arms of said wife before slitting his throat in full view of his now permanently traumatized son.  We get a handful of people with down syndrome who snort cocaine, dance with cross-dressing prostitutes, and then party with an overweight prostitute.  We get our main character providing the arms for his now armless mother, slipping into her wardrobe behind her and doing everything from performing, to crocheting, to playing the piano, to eating breakfast, to murdering women.  We get our main character dressing up as the Invisible Man in his thwarted attempts to create a potion to actually turn into the Invisible Man.  We get our main character burying his victims while delicately covering them with white paint.  We get our main character luring a male wrestler with fake tits who is supposed to be a woman into a solo performance before attacking him/her.  We get clowns and a dwarf who spontaneously show up whenever our main character manifests them.  We get a giant python that emerges out of our main character's pants when he is aroused.

 

We also get Axel Cristóbal Jodorowsky doing whatever the hell he is doing here.

As one could gather from such an assortment of head-scratching set pieces, there are even more to be found in Santa Sangre.  This is Jodorowsky's M.O. after all, his former cult films Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain each littered with unforgettable images that are equal parts provocative, absurd, off-color, disturbing, insane, and hilarious.  Yet comparatively, Santa Sangre is a more straightforward movie in Jodorowsky's oeuvre up until this point, not counting his 1980 film Tusk which was made for children and had a noticeable lack of castration, blasphemy, gender ambiguous characters, murder, and nudity.  Narratively, we can easily follow Jodorowsky and Leoni's script and even guess the twist ending since the allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and the improbability of many instances are readily apparent throughout.  In other words, it utilizes the "unreliable narrator" trope, almost exclusively showing us what our disturbed protagonist Fénix sees and experiences as opposed to what everyone that he actually encounters is experiencing.

 

As far as that disturbed protagonist is concerned, Fénix is portrayed by Jodorowsky's son Axel, the director's other sons Adán and Teo also appearing.  While Teo merely has a minor role as a pimp, Adán gets significant screen time as Fénix as a child, and both brothers look nearly identical to each other.  As opposed to almost every film which does not have the luxury of casting siblings as younger and older versions of the same character, Santa Sangre does, and it provides the movie with an eerie sense of believably that clashes wonderfully with how otherwise surreal and expressive the rest of it is.  Outrageous stuff may be happening in nearly every scene, but the casting makes it seem as if Jodorowsky was able to shoot the first act at one point in time, and then was able to wait about twenty years to shoot the rest.  Yet also consider that other characters from both timelines appear and seem to have not aged, which signifies to the audience that they may or many not exist in the "real" world and instead only in the tortured world of Fénix', something that proves to be all too true by the end.

 

A (bizarre) family affair.

This is a crucial element to psychological horror in general, providing images and scenes that disrupt the audience's expectations about how tangible reality works, throwing into question everything that we are seeing.  It is a surrealist tactic of course, and Jodorowsky being a surrealist knows how to offset the viewer as good if not better than most.  In Santa Sangre, he does this while treating his subjects with a level of compassion, and not just because it is his own offspring that we are seeing on screen.  Fénix is a tragic character across the board, one who was brought up in the circus life and treated brutally by both of his parents, (Guy Stockwell and Blanca Guerra, respectively), one who murdered the other before murdering himself all within eye-site of the young magician.  He is largely neglected by parents, painfully tattooed by his father in order to graduate and "become a man" and then beaten and made to worship the armless girl by his mother, a mother who has an open disdain for the father of her child and seems to only be sticking around due to said father's ability to hypnotize her.  Most of these dysfunctional family dynamics are deliberately left vague as the first act is more concerned with providing us with mere crucial plot points to get to the insinuating tragedy that sets Fénix off on his harrowing arc as a young man.

 

Providing some details is important, but providing ALL of the details as to how Fénix comes to such a fate is not a necessity.  After all, this is a feature-length movie, not a novel or a twelve-part miniseries.  Yet answering all of the "whys" is not something that Jodorowsky is interested in in the first place.  In the commentary track for Santa Sangre, journalist Alan Jones repeatedly tries to get the artist to open up in order to provide some rhyme and reason for any number of moments within the film.  Paraphrasing, Jodorowsky hilariously starts to fire back at him after awhile, saying things like "Why why why. Why?  Because I like it" or "Because that's what it is".  One could say that Jones should know better than in asking a surrealist to explain themselves, but he takes it in stride and after all, Jodorowsky himself went into considerable detail on his earlier commentary tracks for his other films, cluing us in on the specific symbolism that he utilized.  So it is not that ridiculous for Jones to question him as to the, well, ridiculousness of the work.  Of course sometimes though, the "whys" are not important, and in fact having the artist provide all of the justifications for things only robs the viewer of doing the work themselves.

 

And one has their work cut out for themselves here.

Also and as stated, Santa Sangre is a different experience than Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain.  Jodorowsky said that up until this point, he had never dealt with human emotions in his films, thus Santa Sangre was his attempt to explore such things.  His earlier movies were more like challenging and symbolic acid trips, done, (by Jodorowsky's own admission), by a man who was ambitious with his own pretensions.  Various Eastern philosophical influences were at the crust of Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, each movie dealing with spiritual enlightenment as their character's arcs had a forward momentum towards ascension.  We were not made to feel so much for the people on screen in these films; they instead served more of a symbolic purpose for the overall agenda to defy conventions and expand minds.

 

One must also remember that Jodorowsky is an absurdist as much as he is anything.  For almost a century now he has made it a point to say and do outrageous things to get people talking about him and his projects, and he does this while being a kooky goofball, no matter how eyebrow raising his statements are or how eyebrow raising his work is.  “Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles," “I was raping Frank Herbert but with love," “God does not exist, God is not good. All that awaits us is the cat who will urinate on our grave," etc.  There is such an absurdist stream running through Santa Sangre that is unmistakable, which is to say that the movie is not accidentally funny simply because of its eccentric nature.  The moments that are impossible NOT to chuckle at are there by design.  This aligns it with Jodorowsky's agenda to explore human emotions, since laughter is one of the most pleasurable and universal emotions that we all experience.  “Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together," another of his quotes that sums this up accordingly.

 

Comedy and tragedy, together indeed.

One can take a cynical look at the man and just write him off as a wacky eccentric, but there are way more quotes from him that affirm his optimism, his ambition, his belief in the power of art to change people and in effect change the world.  “Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don’t ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!”, “Words don’t heal. Art heals!”, “Art gives to you a new conception of reality, opens your mind, opens your heart, opens your desire of action.”, etc.  So along with all of the absurdity is an agenda to create something uplifting, and in the case of Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky does this by presenting a scenario where a killer can be redeemed, where a killer can evoke sympathy even more than his victims, where a killer's tragedy can be alchemized into something beautiful.

 

Fénix is possessed by his mother's all-consuming spirit, broken off from reality and living in his own warped version of it where anything that arouses him and therefor challenges her must be brutally slain.  He provides his mother's hands, reaping her revenge or reaping what he perceives to be her revenge based on what he witnessed when he was a wee lad.  It is only through the one innocent person from his past entering his life again that he is able to break free.  The mute Alma is that person, portrayed as an adult by the actual hearing-impaired actor Sabrina Dennison.  She has likewise lived a troubled existence post her and Fénix's circus upbringing, being prostituted by her mother, the tattooed lady from all those years ago who provided the straw that broke the camel's back between Fénix' parent's dysfunction.  Once Alma is freed from her mother by Fénix murdering her in his possessed state, the two are eventually reunited, their union shattering the spell that his mother has had on him the whole time.

 

Whole lotta bird symbolism up in this movie.

 

After so much chaos and so much craziness, Santa Sangre ends as a lovely allegory of atonement.  When Fénix and Alma emerge from him being able to finally "kill" the influence of his mother and regain his own sense of self for the first time in his life, the police are waiting there to apprehend him.  Fénix will be captured and he will be punished for his crimes, a sense of justice will be attained.  Yet what does Fénix do when he is told to put up his hands in surrender?  He slowly looks at them in comprehension that at long last, yes, they are indeed HIS hands and not his mothers.  He smiles as he begins to lift them, content, at peace, and optimistic.  The story is over, the camera pulls back, the credits roll, and the audience is left dealing with a barrage of emotions, human emotions just as Jodorowsky intended to examine.

 

It is one thing to just make a film where a bunch of insane things happen that run the gamut between shocking, sickening, strange, and silly.  There can be no rhyme or reason to such things and one can still get a reaction out of an audience by using them.  With Jodorowsky though, there is always a reason.  Whether it is with the endless tarot references in The Holy Mountain or the Judeo-Christian arc in El Topo, Jodorowsky is exploring the human experience and reaching for something grand.  He does it with shock tactics to be sure since his small filmography is loaded with more unforgettable, unusual, and taboo-breaking images than most movie-makers would deliver with dozens more works under their belts.  Yet when Jodorowsky finally does get around to making a film, he does not fuck around.  Santa Sangre hits us on a handful of levels, presenting a full journey of one man overcoming the trauma of his childhood.  The road to get there is full of abnormalities, full of images from a warped mind, (both Jodorowsky's warped mind and that of his protagonist Fénix), full of moments so ridiculous that we can giggle in perverse enjoyment over them.  The film is a thing of beauty though, a masterwork from a French-Chilean renaissance man with ambition to change the world, an ambition that we can all applaud.

 

No matter who's hands are applauding.