A Stunning Achievement: My Winnipeg (2007)
Written: Jun 20 '08 (Updated Jun 25 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Everything: ideas, images, music, narration, humor, photography...
Cons: Not a one.
The Bottom Line: The black and white, stylistically antiquated My Winnipeg has a singularly hypnotic quality. At only 88 minutes, it a marvel of condensation and cinematic and narrative brilliance.
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| trust12345's Full Review: My Winnipeg |
In the universe of Guy Maddin, melodrama -- the histrionic exaggeration of the mundane -- is more real than reality itself. Emotions (envy, desire, sadness) blown out into giant proportions are a better guide to ourselves than some mere chronological account of our deeds. With My Winnipeg (2007), Maddin has performed his most brilliantly achieved and balanced piece of "Romantic self-fashioning," a deliriously dreamlike and masochistically confessional narrative that spills his guts (and his family's dirty laundry) over the screen with a perfect combination of control and abandon.
The film is a double portrait: of Winnipeg (where Maddin spent most of his life) and of self. It immediately becomes clear that these twin stories are inextricably intertwined, and like that childhood game of blotting out the universe by closing one's eyes, two truths emerge: Guy Maddin could not exist without Winnipeg, and Winnipeg needs Guy Maddin to keep watch over it to exist. If the second part sounds insanely narcissistic, remember: babies know they are the absolute center of the universe. The Guy Maddin in this film is like a child anxiously trying to separate from its mother, and yet magnetically attached to her lap. As the Maddin avatar (Darcy Fehr) struggles to break free of Winnepeg's somnambulistic spell, there is a son's guilty conscience at the thought of such a breech: who will take care of Mother? Who will now watch over my home and hometown?
Maddin guides us over the details of his city and youth with an incantatory, dreamlike text that was evidently spoken spontaneously (i.e. without script). With brilliantly intuitive use of repetition and association, we seem to delve deep into the depths of his mind, and into the bizarre history of the Canadian city, built at the geographic center of North America. Through whatever combination of truth and fabulation, Maddin’s Winnepeg is a quixotic snare, a snow-buried Bermuda’s Triangle that none can escape (for no one can ever successfully remain awake). I was reminded of Maddin’s film Careful (1992) in which high altitudes and seclusion drive everyone quietly mad, and in which people chase one another in frustrated Oedipal conquests, only as long as they can keep awake in the oxygen deprivation.
Many of Maddin’s films circle around the same themes and techniques, variations on the themes of the repressed ego that finally explodes. He’s also (of late) been on an autobiographical journey, finding new ways to plough the recurring dream (or nightmare) of the ever-watchful, femme-fatale mother, and the fate of having grown up above a hair salon. If you thought it possible Maddin could exhaust such themes with Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), you’d quickly learn that not only are such tropes limitless in their potential, but that Maddin’s invention and imagination are agile enough to revisit the same material with endless regeneration and freshness. To my mind, My Winnipeg is the apotheosis of Maddin’s inward and outward journeys, the perfect fulfillment and condensation of all preceding films.
My Winnipeg bears uncanny resemblances to Italo Calvino’s masterpiece of philosophical fiction, Invisible Cities. In that novel, Kublai Khan enlists Marco Polo to catalogue every city in his empire in order to avoid their deterioration and collapse. Marco Polo frustrates the emperor by his attention to small, seemingly incidental details, and just when Khan is sure his empire is doomed, referring to the overturned king on a chessboard, Polo shows that through imaginative leaps, an entire universe can be conjured from the wooden square beneath the king. Maddin has taken on the role of Marco Polo (or of the outmoded movie traveloguer, narrating his “exotic” journey), rendering a subjective, entirely personal account of his native city. There is all along a desperate effort to resurrect the dead (both in human terms, with his father, and in the case of demolished, beloved buildings). Maddin even hires a crew of actors to play his family (including the femme fatale starlet, Ann Savage, as his mother), so that he can revisit the unanswered questions of his past. Along with the sleigh rides over garbage heaps, the hidden city of the alleyways, the chessboard horse heads in snow, My Winnipeg is a wonderful Calvinoesque web of associations, or to use Maddin’s word from the narration, a palimpsest: a faux tabula rasa on which new visions are superimposed over a blanked out canvas.
With gorgeous cinematography (e.g. a stand-out séance sequence complete with ballet and magic), hilarious set pieces (the “hall runner” episode and the reference to a TV show about a man who threatens suicide daily until his mother talks him off the ledge), sumptuous Wagnerian music, and a Nabokovian blend of biography and invention, My Winnipeg is Maddin’s best film to date, the most achieved and emotionally satisfying of his gem-packed oeuvre.
Sometimes words can wholly miss the flavor of an artwork. Restart: the film is breezy, enjoyable, funny, bizarre, touching, confounding, and wholly beautiful to look at. A product of dizzying complexity and richness, it nevertheless (to its eternal credit) bears the stamp of what Italians call sprezzatura: an easy, spontaneous flow, or as the term’s originator put it: “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” To achieve such lightness and effortlessness is the hallmark of a great artist. If Maddin can never leave Winnipeg, this is a film that will reward multiple viewings, and will make it difficult ever to forget.
Note: Thanks go to Sue/Millinocket for adding this film to the database.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
trust12345
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Member: John Stone
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