Beginning exactly where 2013’s The Dance of Reality left us—on that mist-shrouded boat—Alejandro Jodorowsky extends his autobiographical meditation into early adulthood and further still into a crowning, late-in-life achievement.

Jodorowsky’s son Adan plays the filmmaker-mystic as a young man, acting against his half brother Brontis, who returns in his role as their grandfather. Father-son conflict, not surprisingly, is the big theme inside this mischievously conceived knot of shared DNA and divided souls. The older man rails violently against his “faggot” son when he catches Alejandro secretly reading Lorca, but the entire two hours of Endless Poetry is ultimately an empathic and grateful gesture toward a wounded bully. The title is apt, not only because of the film’s fluid panorama of dazzling imagery, but because it’s explicitly about Jodorowsky’s rebellion-by-poetry as a youth in postwar Santiago, where he variously encounters real-life figures including Nicanor Parra, Enrique Lihn, and Stella Diaz Varín within the city’s bohemian subculture.

Doing double duty as Varín and, again, as Alejandro’s mother, the remarkably unselfconscious Pamela Flores almost steals the picture as the flame-haired, ball-busting poetess (with a killer right hook) who offers her much-desired ass to the blossoming artist. Jodorowsky’s conflation of these two figures (his mother delivers all of her lines as opera once again, by the way) should give you some idea of the octogenarian filmmaker’s preference for Freudian symbolism that’s maybe heavy-handed and definitely old-fashioned. This is the kind of movie in which a clown might wander into the frame with a beneficent smile, conveniently bearing the balloons that Alejandro can use to launch his mother’s corset into the sky.

It’s also strangely comforting (and never boring) to watch this extraordinary man unload a lifetime’s worth of private symbology onto the screen, often with inspired and offbeat humour (the entire population of an old folks’ home groans in unison as Alejandro tiptoes through its halls), at other times—as in a scene of ritual menstrual sex with a “dwarf”—to inexplicably warm and moving effect. These charged images of cruelty, carnality, ecstasy, and, finally, reconciliation become even more vivid in the hands of Wong Kar-Wai’s favourite cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, as Endless Poetry dances beguilingly toward a climax as cathartic and moving as its predecessor’s. Fans will weep.

Georgia Straight, December 2016