With this second volume of cinematic autobiography, 87-year-old Chilean maverick filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky delivers a moving testimony on the relationship between an oppressive father and the creative temperament. For a director who’s delivered a career’s worth of weirdness – from ‘El Topo’ to ‘Santa Sangre’– it’s a surprise to see something with such universal appeal, requiring no prior knowledge of the Jodorowsky back catalogue.

Instead, ‘Endless Poetry’ asks for an open heart and mind to follow the twentysomething Jodorowsky as he flees his bullying conservative dad and moves among poets, misfits, artists and circus performers while trying to find his own path in life. Jodorowsky makes good use of his family (his sons Adan and Brontis play the director and his dad) and evidently shares Fellini’s love for clowns and generously proportioned ladies.

But he also ensures his story about living life to the full is jam-packed with colourful theatricality – exquisitely rendered by ace cameraman Christopher Doyle. Yes, it’s episodic, overlong and slightly self-involved, but the old man really has poured his heart into this, building to a final leave-taking that’s surprisingly emotive and utterly genuine.

Three years ago, Alejandro Jodorowsky returned to filmmaking for the first time since 1990 with his sumptuous autobiographic epic The Dance of Reality. Now the octogenarian’s second part of a planned five-part series — think the tales of Antoine Doinel on acid — heralds the madcap hippie director of El Topo and The Holy Mountain as a master of a deeply personal magic-realist genre, effortlessly moving as it is psychologically and artistically rich.

Endless Poetry, which screened at Cannes in the same Directors’ Fortnight sidebar that first premiered The Dance of Reality, kicks off just as its predecessor ends. Young Alejandro and his parents (Jeremias Herskovits, Brontis Jodorowsky and a singing Pamela Flores, all returning) arrive in gritty Santiago, Chile’s capital, from their rural outpost in the northern area of the country. Alejandro doesn’t adapt well to the new surroundings, but when he chances upon a copy of Lorca’s poetry, his view of the world, and his place in it, shifts. His father dismisses artists and poets, and orders his son to return to biology textbooks in preparation for life as a doctor. But the seed is planted, and soon Alejandro runs away to join an artistic commune (a “den of degenerates,” as his father calls it), an act of defiance that will shape his personal, professional, and political life.

Gary Tooze

February 27th, 2017