Surreal Sunday

I was listening to a podcast the just mentioned Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and, since I hadn't seen it in a while, I thought I'd review.

To sum up, it was funny, clever, and well executed, especially by Bob Hoskins. It was fun to see the Disney and Warner Bros. legacy characters, and even more so, to see them interacting. But once you've seen that, that's about it. I didn't find it funny enough or clever enough to really thrill me the second time. Oh well. 

I still felt like watching something surreal, so I turned to Jodorowski's Santa Sangre (1989). This is very different, although still pretty out there. It starts with Axel Jodorowski as Fenix, naked in an insane asylum, sitting in a tree in a cell. The only way to get him down is to offer him a raw fish.

In his childhood, Fenix is played by Adan Jodorowski. He is part of a circus - the Boy Magician. His father is burly knife thrower, and his mother, an aerialist. But his father (Guy Stockwell, Dean's brother) is pretty interested in his knife-throwing partner, the sexy tattooed lady, Thelma Tixou. Tixou's daughter (adopted) is a mute girl named Alma who she bullies. Her and Fenix bond very sweetly. 

Fenix's mother is also active in a church for Santa Sangre. They worship a young woman who fought against her rapists and had both arms cut off. The small church they attend has a pool of crimson water set in the floor. But a business man wants to build on the site, and the bishop considers the Santa Sangre cult to be blasphemous, and so the church is destroyed. 

Then, Fenix's mother catches her husband with the tattooed lady, and attacks them. But her husband, the knife thrower, cuts off both of her arms, like Santa Sangre. Presumably this is why we find Fenix in an asylum.

When he sees this armless mother on the street, he escapes. Tixou is now a prostitute in the same city, and when she sends a customer in to rape Alma, she also escapes. Then, in a giallo-inspired scene, we see Tixou stabbed by an unseen attacker.

Now, Fenix has a vaudeville act, where he stands behind his mother and acts as her arms, gesturing while she sings. But she also uses his arms to kill women who he is attracted to - so many women, buried in his yard. When Alma finds him, she tries to take him away, but his mother kill her with his arms. 

SPOILER: of course, his mother died when her arms were cut off. Fenix has been using an armless mannequin in his act. Alma breaks the illusion, and leads him outdoors where the police are waiting. She puts up her hands, and so does he - now his own hands. They no longer belong to his dead mother.

I've left out a lot of surrealistic scenes: The clowns and the little person who accompany Fenix everywhere, the funeral of an elephant, the eage/phoenix tattoo and how Fenix got it and so forth. The inmates of the asylum, mostly played by people with Down's, going on a field trip, and sneaking off to do coke and find a whore. This is a beautiful, disturbing movie, from a script by Dario Argento's brother Claudio and a librarian at an asylum, who based it on his experiences. 

It was an interesting mix of Fellini and giallo. It was a bracing contrast to Roger Rabbit.