"EVERY cinematographic trick was avoided. The actors, enduring a veritable 'Via Crucis,' were stripped naked, tortured and beaten. Artificial blood was never used." So conclude the clues for critics attractively printed and furnished by Panic Productions to accompany Alexandro Jodorowsky's film version of Fernando Arrabal's play, "Fando and Lis".
It's a good thing movies are for one time only, because "Fando and Lis" subjects its heroes to vampirism at several levels of refinement. It also has Fando murder Lis (no retakes on that one), and at her funeral it exposes her body to be devoured in bite-sized portions by her mourners.
But such is the anesthetic effect of Jodorowsky's direction (and perhaps of Arrabal's dramaturgy) that each new outrage invites a yawn; each torture, beating and nonartificial blood letting, an acknowledgment of shocking intention and little more.
He is impotent and she is paralytic, and together, through trash heap and desert, they search for an unattainable city called Tar. Along the way (which, of course, leads back to where they started) they have many meaningful experiences and encounter numerous exemplary grotesque characters.
Repeatedly Fando is misled into strange adventures, and repeatedly he returns to serve and humiliate Lis. Occasionally they remember their childhoods in flashback, and near the end Fando's dying mother reappears and his dead father jumps out of the grave to claim him.
Such figures of the imagination, particularly the imaginations of Hieronymus Bosch, Gustave Dore, and above all, Federico Fellini give a comfortable familiarity, a strong sense of having seen it all before, to the innovative excesses of "Fando and Lis." And Jodorowsky, in everything from his selection of freaks to his choice of camera angles, admits his indebtedness.
It is as if the grotesque of the later Fellini, mostly drained of their (nonartificial) blood, has wandered zombie-like onto a landscape created by a marriage of low budget with literary sources, to take part yet again in the most approved rituals of academic absurdist tradition.
Deprived of responsibility to objective reality, "Fando and Lis" tends to exploit accounts of subjective reality, most obviously, a simplistic Freudian system of guilt and repression. In spite of its fantastic premises, it seems almost wholly conventional in the interpretation it asks for its images. And like most overt film fantasy, the end product is flat, literal, unimaginative.
Neither Sergio Klainer as Fando nor Diana Mariscal as Lis are acceptable actors (whether they could be if they had the chance is another question), and Miss Mariscal's Giulietta Masina make-up (another tribute to Fellini) works to reduce her part from performance to mere representation. For all its invocations of theater of cruelty, "Fando and Lis" hardly ever scares up anything stronger than unpleasant whimsey.
It's a good thing movies are for one time only, because "Fando and Lis" subjects its heroes to vampirism at several levels of refinement. It also has Fando murder Lis (no retakes on that one), and at her funeral it exposes her body to be devoured in bite-sized portions by her mourners.
But such is the anesthetic effect of Jodorowsky's direction (and perhaps of Arrabal's dramaturgy) that each new outrage invites a yawn; each torture, beating and nonartificial blood letting, an acknowledgment of shocking intention and little more.
He is impotent and she is paralytic, and together, through trash heap and desert, they search for an unattainable city called Tar. Along the way (which, of course, leads back to where they started) they have many meaningful experiences and encounter numerous exemplary grotesque characters.
Repeatedly Fando is misled into strange adventures, and repeatedly he returns to serve and humiliate Lis. Occasionally they remember their childhoods in flashback, and near the end Fando's dying mother reappears and his dead father jumps out of the grave to claim him.
Such figures of the imagination, particularly the imaginations of Hieronymus Bosch, Gustave Dore, and above all, Federico Fellini give a comfortable familiarity, a strong sense of having seen it all before, to the innovative excesses of "Fando and Lis." And Jodorowsky, in everything from his selection of freaks to his choice of camera angles, admits his indebtedness.
It is as if the grotesque of the later Fellini, mostly drained of their (nonartificial) blood, has wandered zombie-like onto a landscape created by a marriage of low budget with literary sources, to take part yet again in the most approved rituals of academic absurdist tradition.
Deprived of responsibility to objective reality, "Fando and Lis" tends to exploit accounts of subjective reality, most obviously, a simplistic Freudian system of guilt and repression. In spite of its fantastic premises, it seems almost wholly conventional in the interpretation it asks for its images. And like most overt film fantasy, the end product is flat, literal, unimaginative.
Neither Sergio Klainer as Fando nor Diana Mariscal as Lis are acceptable actors (whether they could be if they had the chance is another question), and Miss Mariscal's Giulietta Masina make-up (another tribute to Fellini) works to reduce her part from performance to mere representation. For all its invocations of theater of cruelty, "Fando and Lis" hardly ever scares up anything stronger than unpleasant whimsey.