Alejandro Jodorowsky
El Topo

LA RECENSIONE

EL TOPO by A. Jodorowsky

"The mole (el topo) is an animal that digs underground and when it reaches the surface and sees the sun, it becomes blind."

For the 4/5 who don't know it, I wanted to point out this film: "El Topo" by Alexandro Jodorowsky, a kind of mystical and surreal western, in which Jodorowsky himself embodies the protagonist (his son will instead play himself, that is, the protagonist's son!), a wandering knight in search of the Holy Grail, who must liberate a village from four gunmen.
Said like this, it seems like a thin plot, but in reality, it uniquely blends Buñuel-like situations with Fellini's visions and the bucolic atmospheres of Sergio Leone.

A combination of religious references, dreamlike allegories, mystical metaphors, and enchanting cinematic transitions that recall something never seen before. A film nothing short of crazy, rich in hallucinations, orgiastic exaltations, violent outbursts and passages of true, high philosophical mysticism, in an endless series of episodes featuring a ragged, freakish, and revolting human fauna, a hyperbole of a humanity adrift.

Fundamentally divided into two parts: the first, where the story of a brazen gunslinger in search of existential answers wandering in a desert, which is more a place of the soul than a real setting, is told, and the second part, where the same gunslinger is resurrected with a renewed spirit and must face an adverse destiny, a true existential calvary, a not too veiled metaphor of Earthly Existence.

A film, on second reading, full of deep thoughts and lofty metaphors encapsulated in dry and sharp dialogues like never before ("Too much perfection is a mistake” says in a passage of the film, or ”A light is not salvation for everyone. For a mole, it can be fatal.”). Dialogues and phrases so beautiful that it would be ideal to have a pen and notebook before watching the film, to jot them all down (without distinction).

Sex, mysticism, splatter, religiosity, horror, surrealism, philosophy, and violence blended together in this masterpiece of 1972 (the echo of '68 and the ideological failure that followed can still be felt) that along with "The Holy Mountain" marked a real revolution in International Cinematic Art and still today represents a true experience, I dare say "ecstatic” which has created numerous followers and, not least, a real religious sect inspired by the film that lives in absolute poverty in the Mexican clearings!

More than a "normal" film, a true psychotropic trip imaginative (without the aid of joints or strange powders…). Try watching it and then tell me the effect it has.

Absolutely to have and watch at least 2/3 times a year: each time you discover something more…