Alejandro Jodorowsky
El topo

EL topo is not the "topo" but the mole.

The mole lives underground, but if it sees the sunlight, it gets blinded.

It's hard to talk about this Jodorowski film.

There's this gunslinger who roams the desert on horseback with a child who is at most 10 years old. The child is completely naked and wears only a hat to protect himself from the sun.

The gunslinger will duel, in his wandering, with other gunslingers, other "masters" like him.

This is the first (longer) part.

In the second part, however, there's a sort of shaman who will help a community of sub-normals, deformed and incestuous, living underground, to exit their burrows to connect with the world on the surface.

It's a film of unusual power.

Every scene, every sequence has a high symbolic, metaphorical value.

It's an odyssey.

It's a cauldron of monsters, an open-air hell, it's the desert.

There is never relaxation, serenity. Dialogue is stripped to the bone. Things happen, continuously. Bizarre things, dreadful things.

The parade of hallucinated characters is unprecedented. From the "bluff" colonel to his "dog" henchmen, from the two dwarfs, one without arms and the other without legs, living symbiotically, to the "shaman jesus" gunslinger to the Freaks of the underground (these definitely have a precedent).

The film is surreal, metaphysical, insane, visionary, decidedly weird.

Yet there is never self-satisfaction, never a desire to amaze at all costs.

A challenging film that requires multiple viewings, insights if you want to "understand."

But let's be careful to prioritize understanding because El topo doesn't speak only to your mind, it speaks to your senses as well, and the senses, especially in this case, are best left unbridled.

The soundtrack is masterful in counterpointing the various sequences. It is jarring, oppressive, ferocious, quirky just like the film.

It's 1970, and this film ranks at the top of this decade because it is full of visual and chromatic solutions typical of that period. But the decade has just begun, so perhaps it is not wrong to say that Jodorowski is a pioneer of this decade. A brand, an example, a symbol that will be followed, admired, and loved almost religiously.

The film is uncomfortable, it cannot "please" rather it makes you feel bad, but it is undoubtedly a masterpiece, in the opinion of the writer.

The gunslinger is Jodorowski himself, and that little naked child is his son.

Jodorowski is still alive, he is 91 years old... and he is probably one of the greatest artists of the last 50 years.