Endless Poetry
classified 15 SPlease note: This was screened in Jan 2017
A glorious feast for the senses, the latest film from Chilean maverick and great-grandfather of cult cinema Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) revisits his coming of age as an aspiring young poet in the thrillingly bohemian Santiago of the 1940s and 50s.
When twenty-year-old Alejandro (played here by his youngest son Adan) decides to become a poet against the will of his conservative Jewish family, he flees his home and finds his way into the inner circle of the bohemian and intellectual avant-garde of the time. Along with other promising but anonymous young writers, he escapes to become totally immersed in a world of poetic experimentation. Living together as few have dared to live before - sensually, authentically, freely and madly - the young Alejandro wanders with an insatiable fervour of discovery through a night world of sex and art, passion and destruction.
Fellini-esque and moving, Endless Poetry sees Jodorowsky (now 87) reinventing himself in the most spectacular and unlikely way. The second in a proposed cycle of five cinematic memoirs (the first was 2013's The Dance of Reality) this is still unmistakably a Jodorowsky film, but also a work of disciplined and touching emotional resonance. The most accessible movie this legend of cult cinema has ever made, may also be his best.