Review of "El Topo"
"El Topo" (The Mole; 鼹鼠) (1970) (ACID WESTERN / SURREALISM / ART-HOUSE)
"El Topo" (English title: "The Mole", Chinese title: "鼹鼠") is a very weird movie which can be described as mix of acid western and surreal art-house feature. It was directed by highly controversial Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky and shot in Mexico (where Jodorowsky lived many years).
As I said this a truly ambitious and difficult to understand film, full of multiple allegories, religious symbolism and far-east philosophy. However everything is disguised as a western movie. But not the western movie you used to watch before, I can assure you of that...
Movie begins with our black-clad hero, gunfighter El Topo (played by director himself) riding a horse through the desert with umbrella and his few years old son...who is naked (in fact not completely naked, he has a hat and shoes). Soon they arrive to a small village and find out that all townspeople (and their animals) were killed in a gruesome way (there is literally a lake of blood!). El Topo proceeds to revenge them by killing their murders: fat Colonel and his group of bandits. In the process our hero frees a woman who was kept as slave by bandidos (later he calls her Mara) and...leaves his son in a monks' mission without any hesitation (yeah, he's such a bad-ass...). However Mara informs him that she can't fall in love with him until El Topo kills 4 best gunfighters who live on this desert. So our protagonist has no choice (anything he thinks so...) and proceeds to search for the gunfighters (masters) one by one and kills them. However he doesn't win thanks to his enormous gunfight skills. No way, he's just cheating them and use very trickery methods as he has no chance to win with them in a fair duels. However when the last master commits suicide in front of El Topo (he's such a masterful man that he doesn't care about such "trivial" things like life...), our hero's sanity starts to collapse and he begins to understand that
"El Topo" (English title: "The Mole", Chinese title: "鼹鼠") is a very weird movie which can be described as mix of acid western and surreal art-house feature. It was directed by highly controversial Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky and shot in Mexico (where Jodorowsky lived many years).
As I said this a truly ambitious and difficult to understand film, full of multiple allegories, religious symbolism and far-east philosophy. However everything is disguised as a western movie. But not the western movie you used to watch before, I can assure you of that...
Movie begins with our black-clad hero, gunfighter El Topo (played by director himself) riding a horse through the desert with umbrella and his few years old son...who is naked (in fact not completely naked, he has a hat and shoes). Soon they arrive to a small village and find out that all townspeople (and their animals) were killed in a gruesome way (there is literally a lake of blood!). El Topo proceeds to revenge them by killing their murders: fat Colonel and his group of bandits. In the process our hero frees a woman who was kept as slave by bandidos (later he calls her Mara) and...leaves his son in a monks' mission without any hesitation (yeah, he's such a bad-ass...). However Mara informs him that she can't fall in love with him until El Topo kills 4 best gunfighters who live on this desert. So our protagonist has no choice (anything he thinks so...) and proceeds to search for the gunfighters (masters) one by one and kills them. However he doesn't win thanks to his enormous gunfight skills. No way, he's just cheating them and use very trickery methods as he has no chance to win with them in a fair duels. However when the last master commits suicide in front of El Topo (he's such a masterful man that he doesn't care about such "trivial" things like life...), our hero's sanity starts to collapse and he begins to understand that