The Holy Mountain

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
Writer & Director ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky
1973, Mexico
Stars ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas, Zamira Saunders

A kaleidoscope of symbolism, symmetry, creativity, misogyny, intentional and unintentional humour, dodgy dubbing and random animals. Jodorowsky gets by on intermediate narrative but a wealth of social and spiritual commentary and prescience: rituals, algorithms, false idols, counterculture outrage, consumerism, selling wars to children via games, etc., and – which got the second biggest laugh from the full audience – religiously themed firearms (the biggest laugh was “My chauffeur is not good at sex”). Meanwhile the soundtrack veers between spiritual chants, jazz, throat singing, to glam and electro. So singular is Jodorowsky’s stream-of-consciousness vision and cut-up carnivalesque narrative that it is impossible to predict what is coming next.

 

 

Jodorowsy fled Mexico during filming because of government threats due to his portrayal of soldiers massacring civilians; John Lennon partly financed it. Gregory J. Smalley writes, 

“The Holy Mountain is meant as a Symbolist work, not as unconscious nonsense; but the end user, unable to decipher the film, experiences it as Surrealism.”  

 Certainly, there’s the overall sense that the true meaning of it all is all in Jodorowsy’s head, and we’re just along for the ride. With the story relegated to intermittently decipherable allegory, the audience is left hooked by the brilliance, bemusement and excess of the film-making.  
   
‘The Holy Mountain’ is all at once and in part stunning, baffling, inconsistent, erratic, dazzling, psychedelic, oblique, deeply felt and always beguiling. The quest is an illusion and the point. Film-making as a religious revelation and indulgence, art as the way to immortality, art for art’s sake.

Yannick

Yannick

Writer & Director ~ Quentin Dupieux

2023, France

Stars ~ Raphaël Quenard, Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin

 

Right from his absurdist ‘Rubber’ Quentin Dupieux has always been existentially worried about audiences (an audience watches the progress of a killer tyre (!) from afar). Even ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ starts with a kid almost willing up a bunch of superheroes out of boredom. ‘Yannick’ continues this investigation with an audience member interrupting a performance of a play to tell the actors that he isn’t enjoying it.

 

Yannick’s (Raphaël Quenard) disturbance of the play ‘Le Cocu’ is hilarious in his simple outrage of just not liking it ~ although we only see a fragment, it does seems dull (and we shall never know what’s in the fridge). It seems relevant that no one else in the audience has such objections. As this grievance goes on and on, it emerges that Yannick is willing to use the threat of violence to get the art he wants. After all, he’s made sacrifices to be there. Yannick’s demand of entertainment is that it makes up for his routine working life and he’s not happy that it doesn’t meet his taste. In a delusion of privilege, he genuinely concludes that entertainment should pander to him.

 

Not that the situation doesn’t bring out some odd behaviour in the cast – the stand-off between actor and Yannick is the other highlight. Quenard’s performance of Yannick is a quirky passive-aggressive delight. He may be articulate enough to argue with the cast and to almost convince audience members to fondle each other (he was just joking), but he’s a little out of his depth when confronted with a laptop. Somewhere between eloquent and incapable. So, Yannick spends a night criticising and rewriting the entertainment on stage, and it turns out that his alternative is an audience winner. But it’s worse than ‘Le Cocu’.

 

It’s funny, brief, odd and the aftertaste is just a little slippery, giving Yannick what he wants as armed police come to free the audience. The audience just want to be artists, but they’re also held hostage by opinionated non-artists. Dupieux films always stow a love/hate relationship with the audience, and this continues to investigate that conflict. Deceptively light, ‘Yannick’ is less irreverent than usual Dupieux in that his discussion about audience and art is upfront here, that it gathers increasing depth upon reflection and don’t be fooled by its apparent wafer-thin premise.