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With Brand
Upon the Brain, Guy Maddin stepped it up a notch, and his new film
My Winnipeg proves he's hit his stride. A phantasmagorial
semi-documentary, My Winnipeg delivers on its promise of a
subjective look at Maddin's hometown. Maddin's sensibility is one of
weird, witty wonderment, but it's also infused with an emotional
honesty. This is a sincere "Dear John" letter to the great,
tumultuous loves of Maddin's youth: his family (including his
mother, played by '40s femme fatale Ann Savage) and his city, which
he pegs as turning its back on its own idiosyncrasy in hopes of
becoming a modern destination.
Maddin
dreamily weaves fact and fiction in pursuit of a higher truth about
his own experience of the city. In his voice-over narration, Maddin
refers to his town as "the Heart of the Heart of the Continent," a
place no one would ever want to leave but that Maddin at long last
hopes to escape. He poetically suggests that he is the child of The
Land as much as of the Mother, both having a "magnetic pull" on him.
But he reasons that he can get both out of his system: "What if I
film my way out of here? It's time for extreme measures." The
strategy, conceived by a half-asleep Maddin (played on-screen by
Darcy Fehr) seen slumped on a dream train, is the stuff of this
"documentary" of Maddin's psyche. One more tour of Winnipeg's
geographical nooks and historical crannies, family photos and home
movies and archival photos and footage; one more consideration of
the unique nature of Winnipeg; and a daring Freudian experiment—then
surely he can leave.
Or perhaps,
like the participants of a "Treasure Hunt" Maddin imagines in the
town's history, rooting through everything that makes Winnipeg great
will only convince him not to claim the top prize of a ticket out of
town. Maddin's tales from Winnipeg are sometimes straightforward
(the legendary local controversy over "the Wolseley elm," the 1919
General Strike), but more often Maddin plays fast and loose,
imagining things as they could be or could have been. He claims, for
instance, that "Winnipeg has ten times the sleepwalking rate of any
other city in the world...Is it the mystically paired river forks?
The biomagnetic influence of our bison? The powerful Northern
Lights?" He dreams up "man pageants" presided over by the
uncontrollable Mayor Frank Cornish, as well as the only television
drama ever produced in Winnipeg, a daily soap called "Ledge Man."
The latter,
says Maddin, starred his mother, who would convince the suicidal
hero to return from the ledge to live another day. But in the
household of Maddin's youth, she's given to obsessive whims and
emotional cruelty. These days Maddin "recreates" with actors playing
his three siblings (Savage plays Maddin's mother playing herself) in
a kind of sick reality-show lock-in complete with early-sixties
fashions. These passages yield to explorations of other influences
on the director's personality: the "gynocracy" that was the hair
salon run by his mother and aunt and the mysteries of sexual
formation born out of his days at the public pool (where Maddin
claims to have been bullied into a "Dance of the Hairless Boners")
and his childhood idolatry of hockey stars like Fred Dunsmore. (Maddin
never mentions here his later life married with children.)
The director
also explains why he's "ashamed to be a Winnipegger." The demolition
of traditional buildings, like the Winnipeg Arena, for "empty" new
replacements strikes Maddin as an insult, even "murder." It's also
an invitation to revisit the death of his father, former business
manager of the Canadian National Hockey team. "Even the architecture
in Winnipeg is sad," Maddin muses. As he tears into inept political
leadership, the unspoken question is clear: can this city be saved
from itself?
Filmed in
the same lovingly old-timey, predominantly black-and-white
style—complete with intertitles—as Brand Upon the Brain!, My
Winnipeg proves that Maddin has perfected his idiosyncratic use of
montage: dreamy imagery and hypnotic, jittery verbal repetitions,
with brilliant musical collage aiding the mood. A lover of silent
film, he's also the closest thing to its modern practitioner, as in
a sequence of a sxually charged, balletic séance. Here, Maddin also
employs swatches of color animation that recall cinema's first
animated feature, the silent The Adventures of Prince Achmed. If
there's a more creative filmmaker working, I'd like to meet him.
Best of all,
despite the film's incredible specificity as one man's take on one
city, the wistful My Winnipeg achieves a powerful universality. It
will be intuitively understood by anyone who's ever had a love-hate
relationship with home, anyone who has obsessed over the formative
years, anyone who has lived long enough to look longingly to the
past and nervously to the future.
From
Groucho Reviews
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