The thing to know .. well if the name of the director is telling you something, it most likely is because you are a fan of his work(s). Having said that, it is obvious that those who are will not like me rating it so low ... but on the other hand I also know that those completely annoyed by him and his movies will think I rated it way too high.

If there are movies that really split viewers, I'd say the ones Jodorowsky makes are a sure fire bet to be amongst them. There is not much of a story here (though I have to admit I do not know the play this is based on and one Jodorowsky had worked on, before turning it into a movie),but there is a lot of symbolism. There are things that you either want to read between the lines, some will align with the views of the director some others you may have made up yourself.

So in a sense you get more than a movie here. Social criticism and a lot allegories ... oh and quite a bit of sexual innuendo! Even if it is still quite tame here. Jodorowsky is also very proud of the fact that he has a lot of non actors in this too .... those who are mean might think "how can I tell the difference between the actors and those who aren't?" ... I have seen a few of his other movies, but I wanted to start from the beginning. The man is clearly controversial ... and his movies are too (he was banned and threatened to be killed over this ... which no matter how you feel about a movie is way too extreme) ... so be aware of certain things and go with the flow ... on a journey you may or may not (totally) understand!

Come to think of it, really, when I got done with the whole miasma that is Fando & Lis, I didn't know what exactly to think, which is the case with all of Alejandro Jodorowsky's films. But more than ever, maybe even more than the 'anything goes' spaghetti-western spoof El Topo, Jodorowsky holds absolutely nothing sacred with cinema, not just with conventions but with anything having to do with anything. The philosopher SlavojZizek once said that when fantasy becomes reality, it's when it becomes a nightmare. But where exactly does the fantasy start and end and reality come into play?

It's really a one-of-a-kind consciousness, not to sound like a pretentious f*** about it, where Jodorowsky puts the outcasts into the limelight here. He's obsessed by them, fascinated, repulsed perhaps, and he knows if only for brief bursts he can't control them. And even more strangely enough, this wasn't even his original work to start with! There were times I shook my head, laughed out loud, and probably felt a little tingling here and there of what those outraged crowds felt when they first saw the film in Mexico in 1968. Only Bunuel has ever made the kind of reaction one sees in revolutions south of the border.

So at the least, even when Fando & Lis doesn't make a lick of sense- which might be fairly often for more than some- Jodorowsky makes a piece of anarchy into provocative, cartoonish poetry that's as dirty and deadly as the empty spaces the two "heroes" go around throughout the picture. They both have dark pasts, these two, as Lis was sexually abused as a little girl by a group of circus performers (I'd guess they're circus performers, they might just be accountants for all one can tell in this world),and Fando had to face wretched contention with his father and mother. They find each other in a dilapidated town, where rubble is everywhere, a jazz band plays randomly, and a piano burns while being played.

The main crux of the 'quest' of the picture is Tar, a city that promises all the pleasures life just doesn't seem to provide. But along the way, there's incident after incident after mind-warped incident that stops them from getting to their goal. Yet it's not just this that they have to deal with, but each other, as Fando is simply a schizophrenic, or a sociopath (you take your pick) who's idea of love is chaining up the paralyzed-from-the-waist-down Lis, and gives new meaning to 'tough-love'. Lis, meanwhile, is like a little lump of jelly, where love is very strong but feeble, following the years of abuse and illness.

So how does Jodorowsky make his film unique? Hmm, let me count the ways...For one thing, he had me saying a line I often put forward in films like this at some point during the duration of the film, "here's where it starts to get weird", in the first ten minutes, maybe sooner. There's no stone unturned in Jodorowsky's passionate ideas of just pure shock value. He might be lacking the more firmly grounded sources of surrealism that Bunuel had, which was the church and the bourgeois, but Jodorowsky probably tops him (and maybe even Fellini too) in befuddling his lead characters probably as much as the audience.

But what's great too about the abstractions is that they almost can't stay too long around these doomed lovers on their quest; just enough time to leave an imprint and move along. As they wander through this baron wasteland of rocky, sandy mountains, Fando grows listless and leaves Lis, and suddenly encounters what looks like a Mexican version of the Golden Girls, playing cards at a table and squeezing fruit on some hunky man. When Fando refuses their advances, it sets off a chain reaction of other large, incensed female hatred against him, as they hurl their fruit-balls like it's bowling, knocking him almost into unconsciousness. But then just as they crawl around him, they drift away.

Things like that are what one can expect in the bigger scenes in the movie, where there's hilarity in spots, as there was in the 'hey, why not' method of film-making in Jodorowsky's other cult efforts. But he's also inspired in flashbacks as well, or what might be seen as fever-dream hallucination aspirations, like a bravura gonzo scene where Fando and Lis cover each other in some weird paint. Or an actually delightful and touching scene where Fando makes up a song about what he'll do if Lis dies, and during this mostly non-lyrical music number, they appear in different forms all over a cemetery.

And because logic is completely turned on its screws here, when Fando and Lis seem to be going in circles, and doom seems to be coming to a peak in the climax, there's even a moment of solemnity that reminded me of something out of Snow White with all the forest creatures coming together for something non-destructive or perverse. While there's been a lot of the latter so far in the film, including transvestites in regalia and crazed sexual implications all around, Jodorowsky almost has the good sense to finally make us care about what the characters are going through- or what they *could* be going through.

Loaded with enough allegory to keep me guessing for days, and a musical score that's equally lively and ambient (only Lynch can go this far in making sound effects like a true art form),Fando & Lis is an unequivocal work of debauchery and directorial originality, where the means of going too-far are tested for whatever it's worth. There's of course the danger of it being too personal, and I felt that danger a few times in the film. But there's also the sense of this being like some comic-book that a madman wrote and designed in a 60s avant-garde fever, which is never too boring for me.

Avant-garde and surrealism is not for everyone. We tend to like our stories to be easy to understand and have nice endings. You will not find that is the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky. He reminds you of Jean Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, David Lynch, Carl Dreyer and Salvador Dali at times, but he is different than all of them. You don't try to understand his work, you just enjoy it. Once you think you understand it, the magic will end.

This is Jodorowsky's first feature-length film. He was a play director before this, and this is actually a play written by Fernando Arrabal. Jodorowsky adapted it for the screen and put his own stamp on it. You will see his fascination with mime and with the French Panic Movement, as well as his own creative genius - or madness to some.

The film debuted at the Acapulco Film Festival, and Jodorowsky literally had to run for his life. It was lost for a long time until brought back on DVD. Now, it is available for those who want to stretch their film minds to the limit.