A surreal journey that begins with the confession of an ophthalmologist and a priest who, leaving his church, is hit by a car. Afterwards, there is a medieval purgatory, grotesque creatures and other bizarre occurrences.
Near the end of Alegrías riojanas (a variety of pickled chili peppers), a character leafs through the first pages of La France contre les robots, the essay that Georges Bernanos wrote in 1945-46 and which is a fierce criticism of the forms of industrial mechanization, globalization, and the emporium of consumption and technology. It is difficult to claim that Velasco Broca’s film is an adaptation of this pamphlet, and it looks nothing, or almost nothing, like Jean-Marie Straub’s transposition of it. Yet there is here the same desire for a holistic re-foundation. In this journey through the unconscious (full of mental images), nothing is stable, starting with the film itself: science fiction, medieval times, cinema of attractions, new age mysticism, and social satire recombine in successive permutations under the cinematic weight of Segundo de Chomón, José Val del Omar, or Iván Zulueta. It is the devil probably. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
