DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky
FEATURING: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal
PLOT: Fando carts and carries his paralyzed lover Lis across a ravaged landscape searching for the legendary city Tar.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: If you’ve ever seen a Jodorowsky movie before, you know what to expect. Fando y Lis is a parade of fantastical, shocking imagery, including snakes that penetrate a baby doll and a man who begs for blood (he extracts a donation with a syringe and drinks it from a brandy snifter). That said, Fando & Lis is one of the least of Jodorwosky’s works, an early curiosity that is thoroughly weird, but not strongly conceived enough to make the List on the first ballot. (Plus, Jodo’s so well-represented here already we don’t feel at all bad about the possibility of leaving one movie off).
COMMENTS: Fando y Lis begins with a woman eating flowers while a siren wails. Later we will learn she is the paraplegic Lis, whose lover Fando will cart her across a bizarre post-apocalyptic landscape searching for the mystical city of Tar. Along the way they encounter a man playing a burning piano, mud zombies, a transvestite parade, and a gang of female bowlers led by a dominatrix, among other absurdities. There will also be flashbacks to both Fando and Lis’ childhoods, and unrelated fantasy sequences of the actors goofing around (posing in a graveyard, and painting their characters’ names on each other). And there’s quite a few more transgressions, both beautiful and clumsy, to be found in this rambling, overstuffed avant-garde experiment. Although Jodorowsky comes from an older bohemian tradition, at times Fando y Lis plays like something made by Mexican hippies, improvising scenes with random props in between hashish tokes.
The “spiritual journey” structure makes for an episodic film, but the ideas aren’t as stunningly realized or obsessively detailed as The Holy Mountain. Here, Jodorowsky has found, but not perfected, his unique voice: it’s as if he’s working with individual sentences, rather than complete paragraphs. It would have helped the movie feel more coherent and unified if the relationship between Fando and Lis was better done, but their dynamic is unpleasant. They unconvincingly profess eternal love for each other, but Fando is much better at conveying his irritation and annoyance at having to carry Lis everywhere, while her character is reduced to desperate, pathetic whining for most of the film.
In 1962 Jodorowsky, Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, feeling that Andre Breton and the old guard Surrealists had lost their edge and were no longer extreme enough in their embrace of absurdity, founded the Panic movement, which was mostly an experimental theater group. Fando & Lis was originally a play from this school, written by Arrabal and staged by Jodorowsky. This movie adaptation is not intended to be faithful; Jodorowsky instead described it as based on his memories of the play. When Fando y Lis premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival in 1968 it caused a riot (presumably due to its abundant nudity and mildly sacrilegious content) and was subsequently banned in Mexico. The film basically disappeared for years. Discovering Jodorowsky in the early 90s, when his films were only available in bootleg VHS versions, I was unaware that he had made a movie before El Topo; Fando wasn’t even a filmography entry. It wasn’t until 2003 that a DVD of this early work suddenly popped up.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Zelenc” who called it a “must see film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
The scene where the drag queens dress Fando as a woman and Lis as a man, igniting fresh attraction between the couple, reminds me of your article on El Topo which says “…Jodorowsky secretly believes women are ultimately attracted to what they find feminine in men.”