Endless Poetry

A film set in Chile, the second part of a life story. The young Alejandro works in his father's shop. The father is hard and mocking and wants his son to study medicine; poetry is a useless occupation to him. The boy leaves home. In Santiago he enters a circle: poets, painters, cabaret performers, circus people. They live together in a house, there is no money, and everyone is making something. From there the film describes that circle. A game of walking the streets in a straight line, poems read to crowds, a relationship with a woman poet, and arguments that last all night. What the narrative is interested in is not art but permission: the young man stops waiting for his father's approval to live his own life, and the film builds that break like a ceremony. The form is not realistic. The sets are openly false, there are cardboard buildings in the street, assistants in black move among the actors and nobody hides it. The director is telling his own life and has cast his family: his elder son plays the father, his younger son plays him as a young man. He appears himself as well, speaking to his younger self. Pamela Flores plays the mother and sings every one of her lines as opera. Alejandro Jodorowsky directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes formal experiment and autobiographical cinema. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the film is excessive, scattered and some scenes are deliberately uncomfortable.