"La Cravate"

This review was fast-lane commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire


Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the best known names in arthouse cinematography, especially famous for making the films "El Topo," "The Holy Mountain," and "Santa Sangre," and for not making the film "Dune." What's less widely known about Jodorowsky is that before he was a filmmaker, he was a clown. In fact, there was a good stretch of time during the 1940's and 1950's when he led a stage-performing troupe of mime-clown-vaudeville type actors, and his first movies were essentially just mime performances + cinematography.

You could almost draw some parallels with Georges Melies here, who started out as a stage magician before realizing "hey I can do cooler magic tricks if the audience is looking through a moving camera" and promptly becoming one of the biggest names in the history of the film medium. Not that Jodorowsky was anywhere near as impactful as Melies (if only because he was born much too late), but still, it's an interesting repetition.

Anyway, "La Cravate," or "The Transposed Heads," is one of Jodorowsky's earliest short films, circa 1957, when he and his colleagues were still mostly stage clowns. The set is clearly a stage covered over in charmingly cheap-looking paper backgrounds and props. The performances are pure mimery set to music. However, you could never just call it a stage performance, because the camera angles and frame boundaries are crucial for making the tricks work and communicating the story's narrative. Watching "La Cravate," it's very apparent that this is the work of a creator on the verge of transitioning from one medium to another.

The film is said to be "loosely based" on a Tomas Mann novella, but that's really an overstatement. "Inspired by" would be more accurate. It takes a core concept from the novella of the same name, but the plot, setting, and characters are completely different. And also considerably more lighthearted and silly, as befitting an almost literal clown routine. A young Alejandro Jodorowsky (along with a number of other actors, for reasons that will soon become clear) plays an insecure man in love with a woman who likes everything about him but his face.

By coincidence, he discovers that a local florist also has a little side-hustle of buying and selling human heads to people who aren't happy with their own.

The main cinematographic gimmick of the film is that they didn't have the special effects to show the removal or reattachment of a human head. So, the mime-actors have to *really* work their body motions to give the impression of a head being twisted off of a neck just under the frame, or that when the camera rises to keep a carried head onscreen there *isn't* a body following right below it. While the woman playing the head-swapping florist does a lot of work in carrying these scenes, I think the more impressive tasks must have been those of the men whose heads she appears to remove.

One of the standouts is this scene, where she sits someone down in something similar to a barber's chair, and the camera slowly, very casually, pans upward so we can no longer see his neck by the time her hand on his head starts to twist it.

Unfortunately, no head that he comes back to his love with will satisfy her. She finds him a total butterface no matter which face he tries. The fact that it's different actors wearing the same costume, with different builds and frames as well as different heads, is something the film tries its best to disguise. In some cases more successfully than others.

Eventually, the man of many faces gives up on getting the girl, and settles for getting his original head back. Unfortunately, by the time he gets back to the head florist, her shop is closed and his head is no longer displayed.

Cue a melancholy sequence of him wandering through a street full of strangers all pressing around him in alienating apathy, no longer remembering who he is or what he's supposed to look like.

It turns out that the reason he can't find his original head is because the head-florist has taken a liking to it, and brought it home from her shop for companionship. There's some really bizarrely hilarious scenes here, like the one where she plays checkers with the head, letting it call its moves. And for some reason she's using apples and pears for their respective pieces.

Or the part where they play a flute together. She fingers, he blows.

Most of the movie has a silly accordion-based background music playing throughout, but the flute music taking over for a moment during the above sequence does a bit to make the soundtrack feel "involved" in the story despite the complete lack of dialogue. For this sequence, at least, though not in most of the film.

When night falls, the severed head is left sitting on the head-florist's mantlepiece, sadly staring at her in bed and wishing it could join her. Meanwhile, its body - with an unwanted head of its own - is turning over dumpsters throughout the nighttime neighbourhood, desperately searching for his real head under the impression it must have been thrown away.

The homeless man he has to contest ownership of that trash can for is also pining for a lost head, it eventually turns out.

Anyway, the ending is far from a surprise twist when it comes. The body finds the house that has his head in it, and the head-florist is delighted to have a body to attach it to so that it can join her in bed and do all the things that they both presumably wanted it to do there. Turns out that trying to completely reinvent yourself to satisfy other people is a bad idea, and looking for people who like you the way you are is a good one. Whodathunkit!

So, happy - if exceptionally weird - ending for this short film. It's even happy for the homeless guy, who turns out to be after the head that the protagonist just traded out his original one for.

The central gimmick of using set design and camera angle to create the illusion of head-removal does wear a bit thin after the midpoint or so. Made it seem a little longer and slower than it was. I feel like if Jodorowsky and Co had figured out just one more fun visual trick to spice up the final act again, "La Cravate" would have been more entertaining throughout.

Still, it generally works for what it is, and the troupe managed to do a lot with an absolute shoestring of a budget. An interesting look at the very beginning of a famous artist's career.