Holy crap

The Holy Mountain

Opens Friday

A hallucinatory mishmash of sociohistorical parable, spiritual inquiry and ritualized megalomania, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 follow-up to El Topo makes that blinkered genre exercise seem as warm and fuzzy as an episode of The Big Valley. Foregoing the (admittedly loose) plotting of its predecessor in favor of an egregiously interior, almost purely audiovisual formula, The Holy Mountain is an undeniable feast for the eye. As for the narrative, it’s probably best approached with the controlled-substance cushion of your choice; the film’s central Christ figure starts toking five minutes in, so take that as your cue.

Given the movie’s sensory thrust, the good news is that this print is taken from ABKCO Films and PostWorks New York’s new high-definition version, restored with Jodorowsky’s participation (unlike last week’s re-release of El Topo), so the experience is that much more intense. Less welcome news is that the cracked Chilean auteur’s reliance on naked preadolescents, physically deformed extras, queasy rough-sex misogyny and animal slaughter—in this case, lizards and toads called upon to reenact the conquest of Mexico—is equally amped-up.

Here, his Mole-iness applies such alienation techniques to a three-tiered story structure, the first segment of which places the aforementioned Jesus-like thief (Horacio Salinas) in modern-day Mexico City so as to indict Euro-Christian expansionism in the New World. From there, the thief moves on to the lair of an alchemist (Jodorowsky, elevating himself to godhood), who prepares him to ascend the titular mountain accompanied by several disciples linked to astrological signs. This is the film’s lengthiest sequence, as each member of the climbing party is provided a distracting, sexually baroque back story, yet to call it tangential within the context of the rest of the action is absurd. Nevertheless it does drag on, as Jodorowsky—with funding from ex-Beatle lawyer and ABKCO founder Allen Klein and, among others, John Lennon and Yoko Ono—can’t seem to go anywhere but too far. (When the alchemist tells the thief, “You are excrement, you can change yourself into gold,” be assured that a lingering close-up of someone’s shit is forthcoming.) Eventually, the movie’s final third follows the pilgrims, ski-suited chimpanzee in tow, up the mountain, at the peak of which is a bar that wouldn’t be out of place in West Hollywood and a backassward brand of enlightenment.

Needless to say, The Holy Mountain succeeds by its images rather than its ideas. Jodorowsky puts every dime of the film’s gringo backing onto the screen, which among other things serves as a cinematic record of a very expensive installation piece. The striking, meticulously formalized tableaux, including a surreal forest of plaster Christs, gunshot wounds that bleed birds and a parade of flayed, crucified dogs (or is it lambs?), also come close to giving the film’s wincingly New Agey pretensions the depth they haughtily presume; Jodorowsky may not be anyone’s idea of a sage, but he has the unerring eye of an artist.

Still, he’s more Coffin Joe than Sergei Eisenstein, and can’t quite pull off the intellectual acrobatics the tale demands. As a result, the film’s simplistic philosophizing, impenetrable symbolism and flat-footed political critique—to say nothing of its groan-worthy, last-reel meta-movie cop-out, which foreshadows Jodorowsky’s subsequent retirement as cinema’s reigning mystic—just aren’t up to the task of supporting its lavish imagery. Rapturously beautiful as The Holy Mountain is, it’s hard not to leave the theater feeling like you’ve been fed a seven-course feast of air.