The Rainbow Thief

1990 fatherless movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: An eccentric millionaire goes into a coma while partying with some colorful whores. His relatives worry that his riches will go to his equally nutty nephew, Prince Meleagre, a guy who's shacked up in the sewer with a low-life criminal named Dima where he spends most of his time seeking enlightenment and performing ventriloquist acts with his dead dog Cronos. Eventually, Uncle Rudolf passes away, and then there's a big surprise. 

Here's a problem, probably: I finished watching this movie and had no real idea who the titular rainbow thief was. The whores? Omar Sharif's character? O'Toole's character somehow? I guess it's more likely that it's Sharif's character since it's a singular thief in the title even though the prostitutes were called something like the Rainbow Girls. 

I also had problems stealing a poster from somebody else, too. I didn't like the above one because of the green sticker with the 12 on it. It makes O'Toole look like he's some Godzilla monster on the prowl or something. But it beats this one: 

That doesn't even make it look like anybody actually tried. I'm not even sure that's Peter O'Toole from this movie. And "You can just live. Or you can live it up." as a tagline? What? That is not the movie I just watched.

The movie I watched was, for the longest time, the last movie Alejandro Jodorowsky directed until The Dance of Reality which apparently is only out in some parts of the world. I had low expectations despite how brilliant I think Jodorowsky's other stuff is, partially because the director has "disowned" this movie, the result of frustration at not having much control over the thing. Though it's not as wild or challenging as El Topo or The Holy Mountain or even Santa Sangre, I still thought it was a pretty good movie. Kind of hard to watch though since it's never been released on dvd and didn't even see a U.S. release theatrically. And that makes little sense to me since it pairs Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif again. Hey, it worked for Lawrence of Arabia, didn't it? Sharif is really the star of this dreamy story, and he's really good as a petty thief. O'Toole's around but never leaves the sewer setting and doesn't get a lot of lines. Christopher Lee is also in this as Uncle Rudolph, surrounded by Dalmatians, clashing cymbals together while riding on some kind of motorized vehicle with a parrot. He feeds his guests giant bones and gives his dogs caviar which probably explains why his relatives are worried about his fortune. And then the scantily-clad Rainbow Girls come in, dance around him, and surround his bed which I imagine is a pretty typical night for somebody like Christopher Lee. There's also a little fellow who gets a big role, a guy helping hock potato bug stuff and wearing a cool suit with a bowler. He's Jean-Yves Tual and has interactions with an extremely tall man, including one scene where he's spun around which I'm not afraid to admit gave me a boner with a capital O. The little person/tall person visual weirdness isn't the only thing Jodorowskian about this movie. There's a carnival atmosphere for a lot of the movie with jugglers and puppets and a fortune teller named Madame Claire who happens to be played by a man. There's a lot of animal imagery including one scene with rats drowning and a sound that is about as horrifying as any sound I've ever heard. And it's a narrative propelled more by symbols and metaphor than anything else. You could look at all of Jodorowsky's movies as reflections of himself. El Topo reflects his religious or mystic side. The Holy Mountain is about Jodorowsky as an artist. Fando and Lis is probably about Jodorowsky as a lover. The Rainbow Thief, a movie he didn't write and was apparently not allowed to make any changes to (he was even threatened), isn't about him at all, but I don't see it as adding up to anything that he should want to detach himself from. And just like Jodorowsky's movies represent him, all the characters in The Rainbow Thief seem to add up to one guy, Omar Sharif's character. The big and little guys, the millionaire, O'Toole's character, and even the whores are really all the same person. And with that reading, this is less of a story about a friendship between O'Toole and Sharif (although a reading about friendship might be just as powerful) and more about one man's quest for enlightenment, one man abandoning what is really non-essential in life and focusing on what is real, the real "gold" that O'Toole rambles about. You know, a symbolic dog and a walk under a rainbow.

So despite what Jodorowsky thinks of his own movie, I really kind of dug this one.