Avis des critiques

At 88 years old, Jodorowsky is still making movies, and his latest, Endless Poetry, is an autobiography at its most bawdily surreal... It's an ecstatic unfurling of memories of a bohemian life that can't be contained in prose.

Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni were cooler and had more finesse, but Jodorowsky's '70s work has a homemade goodness that is endearing ... It's easy to see the appeal, even if it's one I don't personally share in. Fast-forward to the present, and Endless Poetry is Jodorowsky's most polished production by a country mile. But there is still the tendency to engage in big, mythic generalities.

Magic realist narratives thread through like currents of energy... In Endless Poetry, Jeremías Herskovits reprises his role as the young Alejandro, but is soon replaced by Adan, Jodorowsky's youngest son. His eldest son Brontis is once again the father, and Pamela Flores the mother—she also plays his first girlfriend, Varín. These directorial decisions are poetic acts in and of themselves: as he revisits and re-tells his story, Jodorowsky turns metaphor into truth, and symbolism into flesh.

Any viewer looking for restraint in a Jodorowsky movie has been badly misinformed. Parable-spouting, cult-leader-like magnetism is the guy's whole brand; Jodorowsky loves to talk about Jodorowsky with the help of other Jodorowskys (Brontis and Adan Jodorowsky, who play father and son, are his children), but makes few excuses in his self-extrapolations.

Since "Endless Poetry" is the latest film written and directed by the Chilean-born cine-shaman Alejandro Jodorowsky, you can be assured that it contains some of the most vividly strange moments you'll encounter in a movie all year — wild, hallucinatory bursts of visual and conceptual insanity that beggar belief as surely as they defy easy description.

There is more full-frontal nudity than the MPAA could stomach (naked crowd-surfing at a circus!). Epic choreography commingles a marching band of red devils with a street procession of skeletons. This self-reflexive ode to following muses, finding meaning in nothingness, and transcending the sensitive roadblocks between fathers and sons is loopy, irreverent, and more intensely personal than anything its mystic creator has invented before.

Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.

This film, like its precursor, is ultimately about forgiveness: as Jaime attempts to stop the film's Alejandro from sailing to Paris, the filmmaker appears on screen as himself and mediates their farewell. "By not loving me, you taught me that love is an absolute," the young Alejandro murmurs. In the hands of a lesser artist, this would seem pretty trite; here, its sincerity shines through.

Exuberantly surreal, profane, anarchistic in spirit and, it has to be said, more than a little indulgent, this semi-autobiographical odyssey from Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky is a bracing assault on the senses.

As anarcho-surrealist life stories go this is pretty soft-centred... Most of the film is as shallow and silly as it sounds, but it's rarely boring and it generally looks quite vibrant; it's Chris Doyle's most prestigious cinematography gig since the break with Wong Kar Wai, and he rises to the occasion with brash, carnivalesque images.

Crucial encounters and life decisions are revisited, though many from the book are omitted, to keep the larger narrative arc advancing despite the film's rather episodic structure. Jodorowsky re-constructs them in what he calls "a language of dreams" to communicate with the subconsciousness. His cinematic shamanism focuses on a dysfunctional relationship with his father which he re-examines in one of the film´s most touching scenes recreated by Jodorowsky's two sons, Brontis and Adan.

Every bit as deliriously surrealist as the filmmaker's prior work, the crowd-funded Poesia is thankfully free of Danza's cheap CGI effects: instead its spectacle is drawn from the thousands of volunteers who signed up as extras for carnival and circus scenes of Griffithian scale. On a touching note, the film ends with a reconciliation between Alejandro and his father (played by Jodorowsky's son, Brontis), as well as a strident appeal by the director for a cinema of "essence, not appearance".