Chile in the 1930s, and Jewish-Ukranian immigrant Jaime Jodorowsky (Brontis Jodorowsky) is concerned about his young son Alejandro (Jeremias Herskovits) since he thinks he is far too feminine for his liking, what with the boy's close attachment to his mother Sara (Pamela Flores), a thwarted opera singer. Alejandro sports a mane of blonde hair that is not impressing his father, who runs a store in the small coastal town of Tocopilla which has the mine as its main source of income, and also the main source of menfolk missing limbs thanks to overenthusiastic use of dynamite in the process. It is seeing the circus visit town and Jaime takes his son to investigate and meet some old pals - plus there's always the opportunity to show off just how physically strong he can be.
Remember that time you played naked hide and seek with your mother and you both ended up covered in black boot polish? No, me neither, but according to this it was a formative memory for cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, for whom The Dance of Reality was a nostalgia trip as he recreated his childhood in the manner you'd expect from an artist who knew no boundaries when it came to presenting his vision on the screen. Okay, there was one boundary, and that was finding the financing, as a contemporary documentary on how he tried and failed to make a big screen version of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel Dune somewhat stole this effort's thunder.
Seemed many would prefer to wonder what the fantasy epic might have looked like instead of seeking out the work Jodorowsky was actually making as a comeback to movies after over two decades, and in his mid-eighties to boot, evidence that for some talents age did not cow their interest in creating artworks. In the interim he had been concentrating on comics and stage shows, so his constantly searching mind had been kept busy, and like many of his previous films - not that many in light of what a big name he was in esoterica circles - he included members of his family as part of the process. Taking the lead was Brontis, who had played the little boy in El Topo, now in middle age and made up to resemble Josef Stalin as the director illustrated his father's Communist fervour, something the young incarnation of himself cannot make any sense of.
Jodorowsky readily admitted he didn't have a great relationship with his father, and was closer to his mother (Flores sings all her lines as if appearing in a modern opera) who he regarded as never having been blessed with the chances of self-expression her son did, so you could see this as making up for his mother's lack of success as much as his father's, who also gets the redemption treatment. There was so much that was personal here that it was difficult to separate the symbolic from the genuine, as Jodorowsky had doubtlessly enjoyed a particularly bizarre life, so whether he killed vast shoals of fish with a few thrown rocks or whether his mother pissed on his father in a moment of healing catharsis that brought them together were only two hard to believe scenes, but in the phantasmagorical world we were watching they made a weird kind of sense, not that it was easy to explain outside of this.
At some point the young Alejandro loses his curls (represented by the actor visiting the barber who then removes the blonde wig) and the storyline begins to set off on two different courses, one seeing the boy blossom without his father's influence, and the other Jaime on a mission to assassinate the President Carlos Ibáñes (Bastián Bodenhöfer). He actually foils a cohort's assassination attempt and ingratiates himself into the President's household by replacing the chief groom, but after seeing the love his object of hatred has for his white stallion Jaime cannot bring himself to pull the trigger, an indication the film was trying to convey the notion everyone contains multitudes when it comes to approaching their existence. Or at least able to be more three-dimensional than we often view one another, capable of the best and worst of humanity, though Jodorowsky had it that the former was very much more significant than the latter. It was testament to a highly individual talent this was one of his best, oddly emotional works at this late stage in his career. Music by Adan Jodorowsky.
