Sante Sangre

Sante Sangre

1989

Director- Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cast- Axel Jodorowsky, Adan Jodorowsky,  Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Denniso, Faviola Elenka Tapia, Zonia Rangel Mora

            

   This film is a little hard to classify. It is not quite surreal but it does operate outside the boundaries of normal logic. You just have to accept what happens at face value and try not force logic upon the story.

           

    Fenix is a young boy working as a magician in a circus. His father is a lecherous womanizer and the ring leader of the circus. His mother is an acrobat who worship’s a bizarre folk saint, Sante Sangre. Saint Blood was a young girl who was brutally raped. Her attackers cut off her arms, raped her, and left her to die in a pool of her own blood. From that point on, blood flowed from the spot of her death like a spring.

           

    Fenix’s father is having an affair with the Tattooed Woman, a voluptuous siren who is training (and emotionally abusing) a deaf mute girl, Alma. Fenix and Alma become friends. Fenix’s mother, Concha, is jealous and resents her husband’s cheating. One night, in a fit of rage, she tosses acid on his genitals.  He cuts her arms off and then (presumably in grief over losing his favorite toy) he slits his own throat. Fenix witnesses all of this and loses his mind.

           

    Fast forward a few years and Fenix is a patient in an asylum. He is out on a field trip one night and a pimp gives the boys some cocaine and offers to hook them up. The scene of the pimp dancing a mambo down a street lined with garish prostitutes, with a retinue of handicapped children in tow, is one of the film’s many unsettling scenes. While out on the town, low and behold, who does Fenix see, the old homewrecker herself, the Tattooed Woman, now working as a prostitute. She has young Alma with her, letting the men take advantage of her for a fee.

            

    The next day, Fenix’s mother shows up, armless, and leads him away. She mentally dominates him, forcing him to be her arms in life. She performs on stage with him behind her, unseen, with his arms acting as her own. Being unseen seems to come naturally to him as his hero is the Invisible Man. His mother, who is quite vengeful it seems, uses Fenix to kill the Tattooed Woman. She is also very jealous of other women too, as she forces Fenix to kill any woman that he shows an interest in. Finally, his childhood friend Alma shows up. Her love for him is finally the thing that gives him the power to resist his mother.

            

    Two themes are reinforced over and again in the film. The first is losing yourself, your identity, to another. Fenix doesn’t just lose control of his arms to his mother. He loses control over any direction of his life. The boundary between the two is not just diffuse, it disappears.  Another theme is trauma bonds, people who are connected only by the shared horrors in their life. Fenix and his mother are connected that way to his detriment but the trauma bonds between he and Alma turns out to be the thing that might save him.