El Topo movie review & film summary (1970)
The film is also populated, as Jodorowsky's films are, by physically challenged characters; amputees, people with Down syndrome, dwarfs, those whose bodies end at their trunks, men who talk with women's voices, women who talk with men's, a man without legs riding on the shoulders of a man without arms, and one of the most persistent images in the director's work, a symbiosis between a person without arms and another who stands close behind and allows his arms to act as the other's.
Many of these have been exiled to a cave inside a mountain. El Topo, threatened with death, bargains to free them from their cave and digs a tunnel into the mountain. Generations of inbreeding have presumably produced the birth defects on view; no word about how the cave people have been able to eat over the years.
No word, because they are not presented as plausible characters anyway, but as symbols; the mole will dig away from the sun to free them, meaning -- what? You tell me. And think again about that naked child in the early scene. Why naked? El Topo has serapes and cloaks aplenty to shield the child from cold or sun. But a man riding with a clothed child would simply represent, well, man and child on horse. If the child is naked, it becomes a Child, a symbol of itself.
Reviews of "El Topo" tend to be infuriating because their authors, myself included, fail to make coherent sense of the film and are reduced to laundry lists of its ingredients. "These quests," I wrote in my original review, "supply most of the film's generous supply of killings, tortures, disembowelments, hangings, boilings, genocides, and so on." Evocative but scarcely helpful. The film exists as an unforgettable experience, but not as a comprehensible one.
Jodorowsky (born 1929) is a man of many talents, all at the service of his bizarre imagination. At Cannes 1988 he handed me a typewritten autobiography: "Was born in Bolivia, of Russian parents, lived in Chile, worked in Paris, was the partner of Marcel Marceau, founded the 'Panic' movement with Fernando Arrabal, directed 100 plays in Mexico, drew a comic strip, made 'El Topo,' and now lives in the United States -- having not been accepted anywhere, because in Bolivia I was a Russian, in Chile I was a Jew, in Paris I was a Chilean, in Mexico I was French, and now, in America, I am a Mexican."
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