Eliza's Horoscope

Tommy Lee Jones' act of blowing up the bridge is an effort to break the attachment Eliza's spirit is still having to this world. Viewers are thus advised not to take this movie literally. I have read the credits and this casting is international. This is a movie that may have been nominated to compete in Cannes Film Festival in its times. It is full of symbolism and its allegoric imagery sometimes gets the viewer confused. First, this not a sequential movie. The main character remembers how she died raped and killed near a river. Her younger brother probably died in the same place and these memories are very repressed in her memory of the life she just ended. All the characters in the movie are only trying to wake her up to her new state of being using the things she believes like astrology. Those shoes she keeps in that wooden box are her dead relatives. There is no one else in this world waiting for her. There are clues even at the end of the movie when the fat dead guy hands her a piece of the Geronimo poster with Tommy's last message: "I got tired of waiting for you so I'll meet you in the sun." Tommy crossed over but she decided to cling to a world that no longer belongs to her. That is how the movie ends. She is not ready to cross over. It took me a while to understand it but it is very clear now.

A girl is looking for her soul mate-- this movie was very strange-- lots of sequences that look like an hallucinations. Tommy Lee Jones is the only stable one in the picture. It was hard to figure out what the director was trying to say-- Most of the time the main character is dressed in weird clothes and makeup. A weird combination of reality and madness.

Eliza's Horoscope is the story of a naive young lady from the country who comes to the city looking for love. She is told by a man that she will find love in the city. Once there she seeks a Chinese astrologer who tells her she will meet a rich suitor. Innocent as it sounds to wish to be in love, marry, and have children, it is far from. Eliza is living in a dirty city in a brothel sharing a room with a middle-aged prostitute. Her only true male companion is Tommy Lee Jones an American-Indian who may also be an idealist in some sense, but understands the world as it is-an oppressive and immoral place. In fact, one of the best features of the film deals with Tommy Lee Jones bringing Eliza to his grandmother and the grandmother explaining the difference in the quality of life since the village she lived has been taken over and converted by the white settlers into an industrial city. It is because Tommy Lee Jones is a realist that he can see oppression and wants to fight it. Eliza on the otherhand rather than seeing the world as it is, she lives in fantasies and looks for crutches to use in her life. The baby shoes Eliza carries with her in a wooden box are one example. The second is relying on horoscopes. Is the horoscope given by the Chinese world true or false? What is true is that by trying to follow her horoscope she moves more and more away from reality and those she loves through the seedy, underworld of degenerate modern life and loveless, wealthy men. The prostitute throwing away her horoscope and shoes are a desire on her part to try to free Eliza from her inability to see reality. The plot is oftentime confusing as are the hallucinatic images in the film. I can't possible fantom the meaning of the whole film. Normally I wouldn't recommend such a film. However, the movie is visually hypnotic to watch. There is something that draws one want into viewing this film.

An artistically pushy, meandering slice of old-school Anti-Hollywoodism which has something to do with a young woman's interest in astrology becoming possibly either beneficial or detrimental to her romantic pursuits and characteristic growth. Initially intriguing and occasionally visually interesting, it unfortunately digresses rapidly into a merciless hurl of vague imagery and willy-nilly abstraction. What could/would/should have been something dreamy and ethereal comes off a strained and woefully hypnogogic zombie-walk(which appears to have been edited with a melon-baller). There may be an ambiguous between-the-lines supernatural/metaphysical element in play here someplace, but the whole affair is just too high-flown to solidly deduce precisely *what* all this claptrap is supposed to mean.

Admittedly, I have not seen another film quite like ELIZA'S HOROSCOPE, and I suppose I would hesitantly recommend it to a few rabid fans of outré' head cinema. Others will surely find it a rough ride on a very slow train to noplace.

This movie is of interest to the fans of the famous rock group "The Band" in that singer/ keyboardist Richard Manuel appears in several scenes. It looks to me like the movie might have been shot some years before 75, judging by Richard's looks. Interestingly, Jones would later act with The Band's Levon in a considerably better film "Coal Miner's Daughter." Anyway, you really need a special reason to outlast this tough to watch Art film. Alas, the famously sensitive Manuel would commit suicide. I've never heard how he ended up in a movie. Four of the five members of the Band would appear in another bad film "Man Outside."