Watch THIS Instantly: Santa Sangre

Justin here with a look at Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, which is currently available streaming from Netflix.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Ben, Luke, a bunch of friends, and I got together and spent a day watching movies. This is something that we do a few times a year. Sometimes we have a theme and sometimes we don’t. The premise is a simple one though. Everyone gets to pick a movie that they love to show to a captive audience. Most fests have some good and some bad. Everyone who’s shown a movie has bombed at least once. I’m not concerned whether people will like a movie I pick or not, my goal is to show them something they should see. I think this is an important distinction. There are lots of movies that I didn’t like that I’m glad I saw.

I know that I bombed hard with my latest pick, Santa Sangre, which is a movie that I love very much. I also don’t care that no one else really liked it.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre is a hard movie to like. Saying that it’s not for everyone is a huge understatement. However, I think that anyone who is serious about movies should see it. It’s a challenging and rewarding experience. There’s not another movie remotely like it.

Santa Sangre tells the story of Fenix in two different time periods, as a boy and as an adult. As a child, Fenix is a magician in his dad’s circus. Dad is a philandering knife thrower who is having an affair with the tattooed lady. Fenix’s mom is a trapeze artist and leader of a cultish off-spring of the Catholic Church. Their patron saint was a young woman who was raped and had her arms ripped off. In one horrible episode, Fenix watches their makeshift church get destroyed. The emotional fulcrum of the first half of the movie is a profoundly touching scene where Fenix witnesses the death of a baby elephant. The ensuing funeral is one of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful and tormented scenes I’ve ever seen. Trying to describe it wouldn’t do it justice. It’s the kind of experience that I live for, the kind of thing that keeps me watching movies. It’s a sequence that can only exist in the filmic medium.

After some more traumatizing experiences for young Fenix, we catch up with him as an adult. Fenix is in a mental institution behaving like a monkey. Soon afterwards, he reconnects with his mother and re-joins the circus. The overarching theme of the first half is Fenix’s loss of innocence. The second half is about Fenix coming of age and becoming sexually aware. Two major archetypal characters hang over this part. Early on, Fenix encounters a facsimile of Robinson Caruso an obvious representation of the cast-away Fenix has become in the midst of the mental ward. Later it’s the Invisible Man, embodying Fenix’s guilt.

My pet theme that turns my brain on when I’m watching movies is identity and how it’s malleable. It has always captured my imagination from when I was a child thinking about Clark Kent turning into Superman to thinking about how I change when I’m working my job in the criminal justice field to when I’m at home. Fenix’s identity changes throughout Santa Sangre, yet he is never just himself.

The advice I gave for the attendees of the fest going into the movie was to turn the critical part of their brain off and let the images wash over them at an instinctual level. The movie takes place at the intersection of surrealism and fairy tale. Jodorowsky’s main strength as a filmmaker is to bring out an endless succession of powerful imagery. Your mileage may vary somewhat here, but for me, it was particularly effective. Much of the movie takes place in a circus. I have issues with clowns and some puppets. I wouldn’t go as far as calling them phobias of mine, but they do both make me uneasy. There are rich images from Catholicism and Mexican folk art. Jodorowsky also made heavy use of the tarot. The story hits the major arcana in order as Fenix’s story unfolds.

My favorite movies are the ones that give me an emotional experience. I liked to be pushed out of my comfort zone by art. The value in art for me is self-discovery. I can appreciate movies that are done well and tell a good story, but to really connect with me, I need to be moved. I need a different kind of experience. I will always like a movie that provokes a genuine emotional response better than a movie that is just well-crafted even if that experience is draining, troubling, or uncomfortable. I know that I was probably the only one at the fest who really liked Santa Sangre, but if everyone else ended up having a meaningful experience with the movie on some level, I’ll count it as a success.