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Rating: There are films that are so subversive and paradoxical in nature that, within a SINGLE viewing, they manage to become an experiential cornerstone for the viewer who is literally captivated, if not dazzled.
With this "The Holy Mountain" (1973) by Alexandro Jodorowsky, the metaphysical discourse started with the previous "El Topo" (also reviewed by me) becomes all-encompassing, disorienting, and truly transgressive. What previously was kept on a more philosophical level than earthly, here, on the contrary, celebrates the "physicality of things," its being FIRST flesh, blood, body, and THEN ideology and spirit.
A film ideally divided into three sections:
1) THE INITIATION
The protagonist, a wild being without rules or morals, meets the Alchemist Guru (played by Jodorowsky himself) who instructs him on the Mission he wants to assign him. The whole is punctuated by dances, dreamlike scenes, and choreographies that would make Peter Greenway himself blush.
2) THE DISCIPLES
Here, the co-protagonists are presented, borrowed from their world (which is also ours), sick, blasphemous, filled with violence, and brimming with visceral grotesque animality, at times really shocking, in an orgy of excessive visionary that is rarely seen on cinema screens (except for Bunuel, Lynch, Cronenberg, and a few other rare examples), with more or less successful inventions of machinery, violence, and techniques of submission of the various humanity/freaks scattered across the world.
3) THE CLIMB
The protagonist and his disciples will start the symbolic climb of the Holy Mountain for the Redemption of the World and to understand the ultimate meaning of existence, with the final plot twist truly unexpected, the real pinnacle of transgression taken to extremes.
An overwhelming film, full of symbolism and laden with excesses brought to exasperation where the words transgression, heresy, blasphemy, allegory, grotesque, disease, perversion, madness, surrealism, and terrorism (yes, there are components of this type... after all, the specters of the '68 Revolution were still very much alive, and the subversive ideas of '77 were beginning to make their way) merge in a sometimes unbalanced and obsessive manner yet return something truly ALIVE and PULSATING.
I would say an intense life experience rather than a mere film viewing.
For me: ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE!
Here are some curiosities about the film found on some sites:
- Filmed entirely in Mexico, the film cost about $750,000.
- The film is based on "The Ascent of Mount Carmel" by John of the Cross and "Mount Analogue" by René Daumal.
- Before shooting began, the director went a week without sleeping under the supervision of a Zen master and lived side by side with the cast for a month.
- The director wanted the actors to be hypnotized before shooting the scenes. This could not be done, of course.
- The film was supposed to cost 1.5 million dollars, making it the most expensive film ever produced in Mexico until '73. However, the production managed to contain costs to save half of the projected expenditure.
- The film was entirely financed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono after the two had handled the distribution of El Topo (1971) in the USA.
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