Fando Y Lis

I only knew Alejandro Jodorowsky's work in comics, so I bought the Criterion set of four of his films: a short, La Cravate, his first full length, Fando & Lis, and his cult '70s films El Topo and The Holy Mountain. For whatever reason they also put in separate, slimcases for the soundtracks for those latter films as well. I decided to start with Fando Y Lis, and it's fascinating. It's a surreal black-and-white effort where Jodo adapts a play he had been performing theatrically (he didn't write it), wherein two lovers, the cruel Fando and the innocent, white-dressed Lis, travel through the rocky hills and valleys in search of the mystical city of Tar, where everything would presumably be perfect. Along the way, they encounter a number of strange people, both hostile and friendly, including a whip-cracking dominatrix and some bowling ball hurling women, as well as the corpse of Fando's father, who promptly emerges from his grave, tries to push Fando in, and starts making out with the bowling ball women.

The heart of the story is the relationship between Fando and Lis, but the film doesn't make it easy to decide if it's love, desperation or cruelty that holds them together--it seems to be a combination of all three. Fando is hard to like, as he coos softly for the lovely Lis, singing her songs and such, and then chains her once more to the rattling cart he pushes up and down the hills. He drags her through rocks, and even offers her to three strangers, so, you know, he's kind of a jerk.

The film caused outrage in Mexico when it premiered at an Acapulco film festival in, I think, '67, and it's not hard to see why, with the cruelty, gender-bending, and overt sexuality. Jodo has confessed to not understanding the film himself and wanting viewers to interpret it their own way. This is admirable, and I'll believe him up to a point, but I got a strong message from the film. Unlike an idiot I saw on Amazon who created a list reviewing all of Jodo's available works, despite not understanding them, I disagree that Jodo was trying to make the film "as meaningless as possible" (later on the list he cites an interview where Jodo "complains" about his restrictions directing The Rainbow Thief when this interview, featured on the Fando & Lis dvd, is quite clear that Jodo found the constraints a helpful, educational challenge). For my mind, while the film may mean other things, the strongest meaning I got from it, due to the scenes with Fando's mother and father, was that a person cannot evolve or find peace (represented by Tar) until he resolves his feelings about his parents and puts their ghosts to bed. Judging from later in the same documentary previously mentioned, Jodo feels this way. Anyway, it's a visually compelling, disturbing, frequently erotic film that, even if one considers each scene separately and not linearly connected, is still interesting and provocative thoughout. I also have to praise the soundtrack, which is often really unsettling despite what must have been a very small budget.