El Topo (1970)
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El Topo Movie Review
El Topo is a 1970 Mexican avant-garde western film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and starring himself as well. It’s an artistically looking, but very problematic movie.
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“Too much perfection is a mistake“
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A mysterious black-clad gunfighter wanders a mystical Western landscape encountering multiple bizarre characters. This is the premise of the movie, but in actuality, there is no plot to speak of here. Not even a single plot point. If you are one of those people who would count these gunfighters raping people and killing each other as plot, well, I don’t know what else to say to you.
I have never before seen a Jodorowsky movie, and now upon seeing one, I have to admit that I am not a fan. He definitely had an eye for artistic set pieces and camera angles as the production design and especially the cinematography is strikingly strong in this film. The same goes for the editing and some masterfully composed and juxtaposed imagery. The score is also quite effective.
However, all of those admittedly great technicalities could not save the movie from having no storyline whatsoever and no characterization as well. Jodorowsky played the main character and this man is so horrendous and repulsive in his behavior that I genuinely wished for him to die as soon as possible.
What else can you say of the movie that supposedly had a real rape filmed for that particular sequence? This is a rumor, but it might as well be true as this director definitely seems crazy to me. There are countless sequences of sex and violence that are meant to disturb viewers, but to me they all turned one-note pretty quickly and I was bored with the movie, especially the second half.
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El Topo also features a lot of intentionally included Christian imagery, which to me felt blasphemous, which is saying a lot coming from an atheist/agnostic person. I got the feeling that Jodorowsky wanted to shock viewers with every single moment in this film, and he may as well have done that in 1970, but today we are used to these 70s flicks all being over-the-top in sex and violence, so there is nothing new here. The western genre being used for this type of artistic filmmaking was fresh, but not much else unfortunately.
