The Holy Mountain review – inside the mind of a visionary provocateur
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film is now revived in UK cinemas: a plumply overripe fruit of the counterculture, dripping with the juices of spiritual rebellion, semi-comic posturing, consciousness-raising and all-around freakiness. Hardly a moment passes in this movie without a situationist display of outrageousness; it is a dream tableau of the weird and occasionally wonderful.
Unlike his celebrated breakthrough El Topo, this is less like a spaghetti-LSD western and is more urban, notionally more political, and more satirical. But the key Jodorowsky tropes are still there: the absurdism, the hedonism, the tarot mysticism. Some of the group-nudity scenes reminded me of the stoned hippy in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places talking about establishing “a socialism of the emotions”.
For all that this entirely bizarre film is pre-eminently of its time, some of the more cultish scenes may put you in mind of the Ayahuasca ceremony in Noah Baumbach’s 2014 movie While We’re Young, with middle-aged people wearing white robes and earnestly vomiting up their demons. The tone is very different in Jodorowsky of course: not deadly serious, exactly, but certainly without 21st-century irony and disillusion.
Jodorowsky himself plays a mysterious alchemist who purports to hold the secret of turning base metals into gold and achieving immortality. He receives nine supplicants, each associated with a different planet, and leads them all on a bizarre pilgrimage to enlightenment, up the fabled holy mountain.
There are countless images of superlative weirdness, some of which I can never forget – such as the creepy old guy in the street making conversation with the pert child prostitute and then taking out his glass eye to give to her. One woman, making the spiritual ascent, is told: “Rub your clitoris against the mountain!” and she duly does, making the climb considerably more hazardous.
As with El Topo, some of the contrivances look a bit dated, but this is a key work of cinema’s great showman-provocateur, battling against conformity and dullness.
The Holy Mountain is released in the UK on January 24.
