Santa Sangre: Intersound Productions/ Expanded Entertainment Rating: USA: NC-17/ UK: 18/ Australia: R
After hearing tons of praise for the work of Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, (El Topo, Holy Mountain, Fando and Lis) I finally broke down and rented the laserdisc of his 1990 film, Santa Sangre—a movie praised by critics and fans alike for it’s striking imagery and artistic gore. And while I did find some of the visuals intriguing, I found the rest of the film to be a rather dull affair—one full of artistic pretensions and often lacking a concise, cohesive narrative.
Santa Sangre would be Jodorwsky’s first film in roughly eleven years (his last feature prior to this one was a 1978 film called Tusk, which I’ve never even heard of). It tells the story of Fenix (Adan Jodorowsky plays young Fenix, Axel Jodorowsky plays the adult), the child of two carnival performers. His father Orgo (Guy Stockwell: It’s Alive) is the circus’ ringmaster and knife thrower. His mother, Concha (Blanca Guerra: Clear and Present Danger) is a trapeze artist who hangs suspended by her hair as well as a religious fanatic who runs a church devoted to the worship of a young girl who had both of her arms chopped off. While performing one day, she spots her husband sneaking off with the tattooed woman—and in a fit of jealousy, she douses him with acid. He slices both her arms off, then slits his own throat…all in sight of Fenix.
Fenix winds up in an asylum—until his mother comes and rescues him. From there, the two form some sort of bizarre vaudeville act, with Fenix providing arms for his mother (by standing behind her and placing his arms through the sleeves of her outfits). Oh yeah…and she demands that he murder any woman he’s physically attracted to.
There’s more than a hint of Oedipal madness running through Santa Sangre—one pretty much on par with Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s hard to miss the fact that the film is at least in part a homage to Hitchcock’s seminal horror film—whether it’s in the murder of the tattooed lady (which is a vicious knifing, not in the shower, but behind a see-through curtain for part of the sequence) or the film’s twist ending—it’s clear that Jodorowsky was influenced by the master.
And yet, Santa Sangre’s influences don’t stop there. The film has a decidedly Argento look and feel to it, probably since Claudio Argento (Dario’s brother) was a co-writer. There’s none of the giallo conventions that fill Argento’s films like Tenebre, but there is a distinct visual style—one very reminiscent of his work on Suspiria and Inferno…a style where narrative structure takes a back seat to lavish setpieces and oddly disturbing visuals.
But the real problem with the film is that Argento and Jodorowsky set us adrift in a sea of symbolism without any kind of narrative compass. Santa Sangre is an art film—one that wants you to ponder it long after the movie has ended, one that wants you to sit in pretentious bistros and coffee shops debating about what it really means—which is fine, if you make a film that’s interesting enough to warrant that kind of discussion. Unfortunately, Jodorowsky fills this film with an endless array of symbols open to interpretation, yet the story’s so uninteresting that most viewers would rather put it out of their mind entirely rather than dwell on it after the fact.
Running nearly two hours in length, the film moves along at a pace that can only be described as plodding. Jodorowsky spends roughly the first hour of the movie in the past, showing us events that really have nothing to do with the story in the present. Oh sure, in that wonderfully vague symbolic way they’ve got a point—but really, who cares? If you don’t know what the film’s narrative thrust is, how could you possibly even begin to interpret the symbolism? It’s pretentiousness for the sake of being pretentious, and it takes what might have been an interesting film and makes it inaccessible.
The cast does a really nice job, though. Everyone here turns in a fine performance, especially Axel Jodorowsky and Blanca Guerra. These two work so well together that it’s almost as if she’s actually controlling his arms. The effect is surreal, but quite impressive.
The film’s score is probably the most annoying facet of all (next to the disjointed storyline, that is). Jodorowsky has filled the film with an endless barrage of carnival music…and if you’ve ever been to a circus, you know that kind of music gets old pretty fast.
Truthfully, I’m not really sure what to make of Santa Sangre. It’s obvious that Jodorowsky is a gifted director with an eye for the bizarre and surreal visuals, but it’s equally apparent that he relies on that gift far too heavily. There’s an intriguing story buried somewhere inside of this film, one dealing with madness and subjugation and Oedipal complexes taken to extremes, but Jodorowsky has made it so confounding that no one but his most ardent supporters would want to slog through it to find the positives. I wanted to like Santa Sangre, I really did. But as it stands, it’s too pretentious and undisciplined to recommend it to anyone other than hardcore art film fans.
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