Review: Endless Poetry

In what may be the final years of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s life, his work has turned inward and become sentimentally personal. He’s exploring his own autobiography, but retelling it in his own odd way. Jodorowsky’s previous film, 2013’s The Dance of Reality, recounted Jodorowsky’s childhood in Tocopilla, Chile and the birth of his imagination. The movie played like Jodorowsky’s Greatest Hits, with many references to El Topo (47 years old), The Holy Mountain (44 years old), and Santa Sangre (a sprightly 28 years old).

Endless Poetry is a continuation of Jodorowsky’s autobiographical project, beginning with the haunting final shots of The Dance of Reality: young Alejandro (Jeremias Herskovits) with his mother (Pamela Flores) and father (Brontis Jodorowsky) walking down a pier filled with black and white cardboard cutouts of the citizens of Tocopilla, en route to their new home in Santiago. Endless Poetry is a bit like Jodorowsky’s Greatest Hits Volume II, though the final 20ish minutes contains some fresh, inventive, memorable imagery that might be some of the best in Jodorowsky’s career.

Perhaps I think so highly of the finale because it felt so invigorating after some of Endless Poetry‘s middling material about Alejandro Jodorowsky the young and celebrated poet of a bohemian enclave.

Endless Poetry (Poesia Sin Fin)
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Rating: NR
Release Date: July 14, 2017 (limited)
Country: Chile/France

While Herskovitz plays Jodorowsky at the start of the film, he’s soon replaced by Adan Jodorowsky. It marks a jump in time in from Alejandro’s early adolescence into his adulthood, and a move toward adult concerns. It was fascinating to see Herskovitz again, however, who’s seemed to age so fast in just a few years. Adan, who was a child in Santa Sangre, looks so much like his father; Brontis, who was just a child in El Topo, looks like he could be Adan’s father. Throughout the movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky himself appears on screen, offering a kind of wizened and reflective narration for these moments in his past.

If The Dance of Reality was essentially a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age story), Endless Poetry functions more like a künstlerroman (a story about an artist’s development and maturation). Alejandro becomes a poet, though it happens too easily, which is where Jodorowsky’s flair for surreal and alchemical indulgence butts up against the mundane realities of the writing process, especially for people just starting out. Alejandro is fully formed as a poet the moment he reads Lorca for the first time, like a single book unlocks a preternatural facility with language.

There is no struggle with bad poetry, there is almost no self-doubt, and no need to find his footing as a writer. The closest the film alludes to these conflicts is in one early scene at a typewriter. Alejandro pecks out a minor triumph as the giant spectral face of his father dominates the other half of the screen, calling his son a maricón over and over again, deriding the masculinity/sexuality of being an artist. But the film isn’t much concerned about that. Alejandro is already great without the essential work to achieve greatness, and always certain about his greatness without a more troubled relationship with language. He’s even gifted his own bohemian pad to have parties with all the rakes, wits, and creatives of Santiago.

Art has no limitations, but it’s part of the artist’s journey to discover that on their own, and that journey isn’t embarked upon here. We’ve already arrived at the outset. It undercuts one of the more powerful moments toward the end of Endless Poetry. On a circus stage, Alejandro transforms from a simple clown into a poet and then into a melancholic mime right out of Children of Paradise. This ought to feel like some transcendent apotheosis, a transformation from a fool into a different figure (at least a much wiser fool), like progressing through the major arcana in a tarot deck. Instead, it feels like a tautology. It’s not built into the grand arc of Endless Poetry, but a smaller arc of some adjacent scenes in the movie.

This sense of being fully formed as an artist extends into Young Adult Alejandro as a sage. He rarely does wrong around his friends, and if he does there’s at least some justification for it. In a moment that nods to El Topo, Alejandro happens by the apartment where a dwarf friend is attempting suicide. He saves her life, teaches her a spiritual lesson about the value of living, and sleeps with her even though she’s on her period. It’s a little too saintly, and maybe even self-congratulatory, which undercuts the deeper sadness of the scene and what it means. This woman is the girlfriend of his best friend, Enrique Lihn (Leandro Taub), who is drunk and violent and asleep on the front porch the morning after the assignation. Alejandro’s damaged their relationship, which has been built on their mutual anarchic virtuosity as poets, but Enrique was a jerk and the reason his girlfriend tried to take her own life.

This is an autobiographical work, so of course Alejandro’s the center of our attention and of this story, yet there’s something that feels off to me about making yourself the Mary Sue/Gary Stu of your own life. In a lot of ways, Enrique seems like the classic and perhaps more compelling künstlerroman hero because of how flawed and embarrassing and raw he is as a person. The same guy who clowns with his best friend walking down the street as an aesthetic lark is the same raging drunk who can neglect those he loves.

Maybe Alejandro and Enrique could be viewed in tandem as a composite of Alejandro’s early life, where the desire to be wise was complicated by an uncontrolled appetite, and where a mastery of language was essential since other aspects of life couldn’t be so controlled. But maybe that’s my attempt to make this less compelling aspect of Endless Poetry work in context with the multi-film, autobiographical capstone to a career that has changed my life as a lover of film. Like I mentioned in a Cult Club piece on Santa Sangre, I keep finding Jodorowsky’s fingerprints on my imagination.

There’s so much I love about Endless Poetry despite the middling moments and a lot of visual blandness that plagues much of the film. (Like The Dance of Reality, too much of the cinematography seems too flat, too plain, and uncinematic.) There’s a strange 80s-deco art-bar like something out of Brazil where Alejandro is drawn to technicolor poet Stella Díaz Varín. She’s played by the same actress who plays Alejandro’s mother for maximum Freudian impact. There are a few scenes where art seems like the only refuge from the rising Ibáñez dictatorship; I’m missing that cultural and historical context that would enliven the film. There’s a moment when Young Adult Alejandro and Old Alejandro must make peace with Alejandro’s father. A complicated love emerges when one views a pivotal moment in the past knowing what the future holds.

I might have liked more of Old Jodorowsky hopping into the film and commenting about the people and places of his life. He’s the center of it all, so why stay outside when there’s so much I’d like to know. What did he love about this woman? What did Lorca’s poetry say to him as a young man, and what other poets spoke to him? What is machismo in the face of art? What does it mean to him to be a man? What regrets are there and what would he have liked to do differently? I wonder if the next film will be the last one, and what this all might feel like viewed as a single work rather than loose chapters with a looser shape. If this marks the end of Jodorowsky, it’s fitting that it also feels like the beginning.