More MUBI updates from the South of France where ...
In Cannes the films dance 
From Daniel Kasman's Sunday report
Like Raúl Ruiz last year (Night Across the Street), a Chilean returns to his home country to conjure a past to stage in the present. Alejandro Jodorowsky's first film in over twenty years is a complete family affair, the very definition of a personal film: an autobiographic-biography first of himself as a child (played by, I believe, his grandson) and then of his father (played by his son), with even more family both before and behind the camera. Staged in Jodorowsky's hometown of Tocopilla in the present but set in the 30s, the simple digital phantasmagoria, sourced from fiction and non-fiction books by the director about himself and his father, conjures the demons and alluring visions of the era's contests between Communism, fascism, anti-Semitism, and the Catholic church. In this context, with Tocopilla modestly appearing not as history but as a more fantastical but never unreal present day, La danza de la realidad (The Dance of Reality) unabashedly fuses the compassionate grotesquerie of his Chilean town's underclasses with sweetly archetypal familial drama and a fierce political struggle both naïve and direct. It is a truly musical film, scored (by a Jodorowsky) from end to end (and featuring Jodorowsky's mother as a super-buxom, always-singing goddess of robustness) and episodically moving along part sketch-like, part-picaresque, part-nostalgia trip (in all senses of the word). I am reminded not just of Ruiz's last picture—its gentle returns, the passing and re-passing over of time, people and memories, its elaborate, playful but deeply earnest political consciousness—but also of Agnès Varda's, the self portrait essay The Beaches of Agnès, wry, divergent, melancholy and hopeful. It is impossible to tell if this is a parting shot (Ruiz) or a new salvo (Varda, let's all hope), but in either case the return of Jodorowsky is a most welcome immersion into a very missed world. ■
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