The bizarre films of counterculture icon Alejandro Jodorowsky are, without any doubt, some of the most unique cinematic experiences one can have, and, in my humble opinion, also some of the greatest. Eleven years after debuting with the great, but relatively harmless short "La Cravate" (aka. "The Transposed Heads") of 1957, Jodorowsky made his feature length debut in 1968 with this incredibly surreal, fascinating and often disturbing gem called "Fando y Lis". It is never possible to fully understand a Jodorowsky film and its 'meaning' by 100 per cent, even after multiple viewings. Even so (or therefore), there is nothing more fascinating than the cinematic World of Jodorowsky.

The adaptation of a play by Fernando Arrabal, with whom Jodorowsky had worked on stage before, "Fando y Lis" is just as surreal as the master's more famous films to follow, "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain". This is also doubtlessly Jodorowsky's most pessimistic film and, at the time of its release, it was scandalous due to its disturbing, uncompromising and bizarre nature. When it premiered in Mexico, "Fando y Lis" caused such outrage that riots broke out, and Jodorowsky had to escape the theater secretly in order to avoid getting seriously hurt or even lynched by protesters. The film was subsequently banned by the Mexican government.

The film, which is divided into four acts, follows Fando (Sergio Kleiner) and his crippled girlfriend Lis (Diana Mariscal), who drift through post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of a mythical city named Tar. In search for Tar, a sort of paradise that has survived a 'final war' that has left the world in ruins, Fando y Lis encounter a variety of bizarre people and situations. On their journey, which is always surreal, and gradually gets disturbing, Fando becomes more and more abusive towards his innocent, helpless girlfriend... This is only a very vague description of the film, however it is hardly possible to give a proper one. As Jodorowsky' other films, "Fando y Lis" simply is a film that has to be seen. It is no wonder that this was highly controversial when it came out, and it is still disturbing today. Scenes which broach the issue of child abuse were arguably the most controversial ones, but the film includes all other sorts of controversial topics, including violence in relationships, humiliation and exploitation of the poor, cross-dressing, incest, etc., as well as the Jodorowsky-typical religious/iconoclastic symbolism. These were, of course, explosive issues for narrow-minded so-called 'moralists' at the time, and it is therefor no wonder that the film was controversial. Jodorowsky also gives his personal, very bizarre vision of the living dead in this film, which was released shortly before G.A. Romero's milestone "Night of the Living Dead". The film is often disturbing, yet is fascinating on so many other levels, sometimes beautiful and even funny, and always very, very weird (in an ingenious manner).

I cannot claim that this is a proper description of "Fando y Lis", but, as said, there is probably no such thing as a proper description of a Jodorowsky film. Jodorowsky's films are probably not accessible to everybody, and to many "Fando Y Lis" is probably even his least accessible film. This is maybe the Jodorowsky film, which is most strictly a film for Jodorowsky-fans. It may not quite as continuously overwhelming as his masterpieces "El Topo" (1970), "The Holy Mountain" (1973) and "Santa Sangre" (1989), but it certainly is a fascinating experience that is unique and awe-inspiring. To those unfamiliar with Jodorowsky's cinema, I recommend to begin your journey into this great man's cinematic world with "El Topo" or "The Holy Mountain", or even with "Santa Sangre", which is probably his most accessible film to lovers of a more conventional kind of cinema. Those who loved the previously mentioned films should definitely see this one. To lovers of surreal art-house cinema, and to my fellow Jodorowsky-fans in particular, "Fando y Lis" is an absolute must see!

This is the first film of this type that I've seen, and I have mixed emotions about it. I have to say that this film is very tedious to watch, and you have to be open minded, and not expecting nothing normal. Watching it from the surface is easy to say it has no sense or narrative at all, but if you pay some attention you'll be able to at least figure out the relation between scenes and basic concepts, such as love, death and fear. This is a very abstract film and I don't think I got all the hidden messages, but the ones I interpreted, left me with a rewarding feeling. If you're looking for something different and unique in film, this is something you'll find interesting, but be patient though, because the movie is slow

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.