Review: The Dance of Reality

City Paper grade: A-

Breaking a 23-year dry spell, cinematic provocateur Alejandro Jodorowsky returns to the screen with a movie about his childhood in the small seaside town of Tocopilla, Chile, during the 1930s. This being Jodorowsky, his remembrance of things past abounds with disfigured miners who sing about the dynamite explosions that deformed them, a hunchback love interest and a shocking (and near-impossible-to-fake) scene in which his mother urinates on his father to cure him of the plague. Unlike his earlier work, The Dance of Reality has a relatively straightforward narrative, which makes it easier to digest all of the symbolism that baffled viewers of his more free-form, psychedelic films. Raised by Jewish-Ukrainian parents, Jodorowsky (Jeremias Herskowits) is a sensitive boy who’s treated as an outsider by the anti-Semitic locals. His stern father, Jaime (played by Jodorowsky’s real-life son Brontis), reveres Stalin, and fashions himself in his image, cultivating a thick mustache, wearing army fatigues and testing his son’s bravery and tolerance for pain. His mother Sara (Pamela Flores), a voluptuous woman who sings all of her lines with an operatic voice, exerts a different kind of power, one that is supernatural and dismissed by her husband. The second (not-so autobiographical) half of the movie humanizes the heartless father, following him on a meandering (and ultimately redemptive) quest to kill Chilean dictator Gen. Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, Jaime’s physical and emotional twin. Although the movie’s two halves don’t seamlessly mesh, both are necessary for the soul-healing the 85-year-old director seems to desire. Events from his youth are reimagined with surreal flourishes, and these vivid scenes, personal yet profound, are seared into the viewer’s memory.