The Screengrab : cowards bend the knee

Screengrab Review: My Winnipeg

Peter Smith — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

"I must leave," Guy Maddin intones solemnly at the outset of his hilariously sardonic-affectionate tribute to Manitoba's capital, where he's lived and worked his entire life. "I must leave here now." But while it's Maddin's voice we hear on the soundtrack, the anxious-looking "Guy Maddin" we see booking it out of town on a locomotive in this early sequence is actor Darcy Fehr, in a puckish mix of invention and autobiography that characterizes the movie as a whole. Yes, Winnipeg did experience a turbulent strike in 1919 that was directly inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. No, Winnipeg in all likelihood not does have ten times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world. Merrily juxtaposing history and myth, Maddin/"Maddin" decides to "film [his] way out of here," shepherding his surviving family into the apartment-cum-salon where he grew up and re-enacting episodes from his childhood. According to the narration, his tyrannical mother plays herself; those who stick around for the credits will discover that the role is in fact played by Ann Savage, the long-ago star of Detour.

Shot in Maddin's now-standard faux-silent style, complete with apparent celluloid damage and breathless intertitles, My Winnipeg itself amounts to a neverending series of detours. Truth is, the titular subject is entirely ostensible, which is both the film's charm and its greatest limitation.

Unlike Maddin's last feature, the overly plotty Brand Upon the Brain!, this one never wears out its welcome, but neither does it ever achieve the galvanizing force of Maddin's best work, simply because we're forever off to the next random goofy vignette. (Cowards Bend the Knee, which worked similar quasi-autobiographical terrain, derived much of its lunatic power from Maddin's expert use of silent horror tropes.) In other words, the movie is kind of a doodle — and yet, it's a magnificent doodle, with parts so individually flavorful that you don't so much care about pulling out your calculator and working out their sum. Any film deranged enough to include a a fictional '60s TV show called "Ledge Man," which found the hero threatening to leap to his death from a tall building every single week, really must be seen.

Trailer Review: My Winnipeg

Paul Clark — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Of all the movies I wasn’t able to see at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, one of my biggest regrets was missing the latest film by Manitoba’s mad genius Guy Maddin. Of course, only part of my regret has to do with the film itself- it would have been a blast to see it narrated live by the director, who has always been a fascinating character. But the film itself, which has received almost unanimously positive reviews, should be more than compelling enough on its own. Like many of his earlier works- in particular Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Cowards Bend the Knee, and Brand Upon the Brain!- Maddin appears to be re-imagining his own childhood here through a prism of frenzied Freudian melodrama and wicked, film-saturated satire to create an unmistakably Maddin-flavored cocktail. Nice to see Ann Savage, the infamous “dame with claws” from Detour so many years ago, turn up again here as the Maddin family matriarch. I’m not sure how all of this strangeness- like a “man pageant” just around the corner from Sissy Boy Slap Party- but I’m eager to find out.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "My Winnipeg"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

My Winnipeg, the latest from Canadian filmmaker and friend of the Screengrab Guy Maddin, was commissioned by the Documentary Channel, but as noted here recently, it's hardly the straight history-travelogue that the title might suggest. It's an impressionistic, semi-satitic tribute to the hometown of his fantasy life that Maddin's feelings about the city as a taking-off point, the way his recent "autobiographical" films Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! take off from his feelings about his memories from his early life. Those feelings, as they come through here, might best be described as affectionate but haunted. In Maddin's telling, the entire city is a folksy snowscape where people might yearn to get away but aren't awake enough to formulate an escape plan. "Guy", our hero and narrator (played by Darcy Fehr) recalls that for a hundred years, there was a yearly, day-long, city-wide treasure hunt, and the prize was a train ticket out of town, but nobody ever used their winnings because, after spending a day exploring the city, no winner could bear to leave. At the same time, Guy says, Winnipeg has ten times the number of sleepwalkers of any other city; at night, the sidewalks are clogged with folks who've gone to bed only to stagger outside and wander zombie-like through the cutting winds. It's as if their subconscious minds where sending their bodies a message that their brains don't want to hear. Guy, who himself would dearly love to leave but can't, murmurs to himself, "Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake!"

Naturally, Maddin's feelings about the place he grew up in are tangled up with his feelings about his family, his mother in particular. (She's played here by the 1940's starlet Ann Savage, best remembered as the female lead in Egdar G. Ulmer's febrile noir Detour, in her first film role in more than twenty years.) Eager to get at the roots of his unresolved childhood issues, Maddin decides to move back in with Mom and use some of the film budget to hire actors and a dog to "play" his siblings and his "long, long, long-dead chihuahua", Toby. ("Because Mom doesn't want Dad left out, "we pretend to have had him exhumed and reburied in the living room.") This idea, which is partially borrowed from Albert Brooks's Mother, generates some laughs but not a lot of mileage. (It didn't generate much mileage in Mother either, where it proved good for fewer laughs.) In general, My Winnipeg feels as if it were made to order; it lacks the fever-dream obsessiveness of Maddin's best work. But it's very funny and consistently entertaining. It turns out that Mom stars in the only dramatic TV series ever made in Winnipeg, Ledge Man, in which she plays the mother of "an overly sensitive man" who each week has to be coaxed back inside after climbing out onto the ledge over some perceived slight. (It's been running for fifty years and Mom hasn't missed an episode.) And the stream-of-consciousness narration suggests a previously unsuspected influence on Maddin's work: Ken "Word Jazz" Nordine. It's nice that cable TV is doing its part to keep Maddin working, but My Winnipeg gave me a feeling that he really ought to have his own late-night radio show.

Video of the Day: Maddin 2002

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

One of the marks of a true artist is that even his casual, unimportant efforts are worth watching. Such is the case with this brief clip of auditions for Guy Maddin's film Cowards Bend the Knee. Made by Maddin and his editor John Gurdebeke for no particular reason other than just screwing around, the clip (featuring a number of actors who actually ended up in the film, including Melissa Dionisio, Mike Bell and David Stuart Evans), is a lovely little piece of filmmaking that oddly echoes the overall tone of the movie. — Leonard Pierce