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Highly Overrated But Still Good

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

La cravate (1957) *** (out of 4)The first film from director Alejandro Jodorowsky was considered lost for five decades until a print thankfully showed up. The story is pretty simple as we meet a young woman who runs a living head factory. In other words, her shelves are full of heads and we see how the shop works.This Jodorowsky shorts clocks in at 20 minutes, which is a tad bit too long. For the most part this is a well-made short that manages to be entertaining throughout, although there's no question that it drags in a few spots. I thought the director did a very good job at making the mime style work and I also thought that the cast, including the director, were good. The cinematography is good as is the music score.

"La cravate" is a pretty absurd 20-minute short film from director Alejandro Jodorowsky, probably his most known work. He is way into his 80s today and still appears in films, even if the last almost 60 years certainly have not been that prolific for him. It is a French movie and the man is Chilean-born, but don't worry, you don't have to speak French or Spanish in order to watch this as there is nobody speaking in here. It's basically a story about a young woman who sells human heads. Sounds like a horror movie, but it is really much more of a comedy with all the bright colors and joyful music. To me, it looked a lot like a theater play, as if I was watching it live on stage. Still, I must say this Thomas Mann adaptation was missing something to keep me really interested here, even if I must say this film looked a lot younger than 1957. All in all, neither the acting nor the acting were fascinating enough to let me recommend this one. Thumbs down.

Fans of avant garde film may find this interesting, and fans of Alejandro Jodorowsky will certainly want to see his first film.Those with psychological training my see this as an example of Body Dysmorphic Disorder - an internal dissatisfaction with their appearance. Fortunately, Jodorowsky has a solution - as store where you can find a new head if you, or your loved one is repulsed by yours.But, what is interesting is that there is always someone who wants your head when you don't like it. Luckily, our hero found that out before it was too late and regained his head and a new love.So, don't lose your head over some woman, just keep looking until you find the one that likes your's the way it is.

This is quite the rare case: a story performed entirely in mime-form, where everything is silent but done so for a very physical effect by the actors/performers, that actually works. Usually mimes can be a little irksome (maybe not, depends on who's miming and how well the audience can take it), but Alejandro Jodorowksy, in his first attempt at film-making, makes this as experimental as something like Un Chien Andalou yet with an emotional core that can be understood by viewers open to it all. It's based on a novella by Thomas Mann about a woman who wants both her husband and lover back, and somehow gets their heads put into the wrong bodies! There's a constant sense of both a dream in the scenery and body language, but disillusionment in what the characters are feeling back in their not-quite selves. There's the woman in particular, acted very well (she's the one sprawled out on a couch or other, with black hair, at least I *think* it's her), who responds to the Jodorowsky character at first with disdain, but then noticing his body changes her attitude. This is a brilliant little scene that calls back to those captivating, surreal moments in film-making of the silent era, and just in performing arts in general, where things were meant to be performed to be understood by the audience intuitively to an extent, not necessarily explained exactly.It might be just as well; some moments in here call to the strengths of Jodorowsky's wild-man cinema even this early on, as figures in a 'city' environment pass by the disheartened husband, faces coming always close to the screen like it's meant to be fleeting but always impressionable via make-up and elaborate costumes. La Cravate, or the Severed Heads, also carries some unique traits as a Jodorowsky effort; the advantage of color is ever powerful and varied in tone from head to environment (different than what I expected from an underground director, especially as a precursor to Fando & Lis), but it's also a work that's usually more light than dark and more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny in its stabs of absurdism. One can't help but chuckle at one of the heads looking up and giving a wink and a smile to the helpless Jodorowsky or his counterpart, or in merely seeing the process of 'transposing' a head. The music by Edgar Bischoff is also a factor for how sweet it is, contrasting the oddball mood of the material with melodies that sound like happy walks in the park. In short, it's a find that is quite a stroke of luck; the film was believed lost until rediscovered just in time for the DVD collection set, and for fans it's a minor delight. 8.5/10