Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Careful is one of the funniest and most bizarre "cult" movies around— more original than everything by John Waters, as darkly strange and bizarre as anything by David Lynch, and as ingeniously inventive as The Kingdom by Lars von Trier. While autodidact Canadian director Guy Maddin is not exactly obscure (he has carved out a niche in the film festival circuit and among art house junkies), his films do not quite have the underground following they most assuredly deserve. One simple reason comes to mind: he is working so far outside the Hollywood system, and with themes so iconoclastic, anachronistic and anathema to the mainstream, that he might as well be shooting films on non-planet Pluto— which is almost the case: he shoots most of his films in Winnipeg, Canada.

A Maddin triumph and cinematic masterpiece, Careful (1992) is the director’s third feature, after Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988) and Archangel (1990), two films of lesser footing. The style and themes of Careful, steeped in the traditions of silent film and German Expressionist art, anticipate Maddin’s later forays in silent movie re-imaginings: Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary (2002) and the recent Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), as well as one of the greatest short films of all time, The Heart of the World (2000).

Careful, co-written by Maddin and collaborator George Toles, is simultaneously a spoof of and earnest tribute to a variety of sub-genres of 1920s silent film, chiefly the mountain picture (man against mountain/nature films, the departure point for actress-turned-director Leni Riefenstahl) and the butler film. Maddin, true to his Luddite principles, uses film techniques and technologies available to directors in the early years of cinema: intertitles, hand-colored frames, sepia toning, and no direct sound (all dialogue is dubbed separately.) Set in the invented mountain village of Tolzbad in the 19th Century, Careful is high melodrama and dead-pan camp, a delightful concoction of fairy tale, inscrutable opera synopses, kitsch trappings, b-movie effects, and Freudian field day— hysteria, dreams as wish fulfillment, Oedipal instincts, repression. Maddin has half-jokingly labeled this a "pro-incest" film.

The premise is brilliantly arch and ludicrous, though treated with dread seriousness within the world of the film. Since avalanches are a mortal threat to mountain villages, sounds must be kept to an absolute minimum and all reckless behavior curtailed. Tolzbad is marginally fortunate in that an acoustic phenomenon of echoes canceling their sources offers the village’s inhabitants some freedom to make noises. But the village elders understand from experience that this is merely a false security: avalanche can strike at any moment.

Through narration and a curious dumb show, the opening of the film introduces us to the everpresent dangers afoot, and the carefulness, bordering on fearful timidity, with which all children must learn to behave. The suppression of sound is a perfect double for the film’s parallel theme: the repression of forbidden sexual cravings. In these remote and high altitudes that make the mind dizzy, just as a single event can set off an avalanche, one man’s incestuous dreams set in motion a snowballing crisis of Oedipal lust that spreads through the village like a fever. Once an avalanche begins, nothing can stop it, and the same can be said for the outlet of sexual energy that is pent up in these diffident, Victorian characters.

The plot is convoluted as any opera’s, but the basics are as follows: a mother, Zenaida (played gamely by the lovely Gosia Dobrowolska) lives under one roof with her three grown up boys, Franz, Johann (Brent Neal) and Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch). Owing to pained circumstances surrounding his birth, Franz is kept in the attic, where he languishes in solitude, ignored by his mother and fed surreptitiously by his brothers. Johann and Grigorss attend butler school, where they learn etiquette in the hopes of becoming servants to the reclusive Count Knotgers (played by Australian director Paul Cox), who harbors amorous intentions for the widow, Zenaida. (Knotgers meanwhile has a skeleton in his closet, quite literally: he keeps the embalmed corpse of his mother in a secret room.) Herr Trota (Victor Cowie) a village patriarch and occasional narrator of the film, dotes heavily on one daughter— Sigleinde, while all but ignoring his other daughter, Klara (Sarah Neville), who is jealous of her sister’s attention. Johann is engaged to Klara, but he can’t stop thinking about his mother, and finally, his shame and lust drive him over the edge. This is the spark that ignites the flame, consuming everyone in a conflagration of Oedipal lust and murder.

Careful has the weight and suggestive power of a Grimm’s fairy tale, but its narrative is breezy and eminently enjoyable. So many elements combine to make this film a radical tour de force. The cutting in and out, low-tech sound design (by Maddin) enhances the claustrophobia of the village, while the hilariously unrealistic yet beautiful mise en scene (contrived by art director Jeff Solylo) further contributes to the lurid sense of witnessing events at the bottom of the sea or through a key hole.

Stilted but canny dialogue, purposefully awkward stage blocking, and a richly allusive score by John McCulloch (filled with farting waltzes for sour horns and curiously myopic minuets)— all lend infinite charm to this jerrybuilt universe of repressed desires. As much as this film is a collection of forgotten relics of early cinema history, there is nothing like Careful, which casts a spell entirely of its own devising. Few films can be uproarious and profound, high and low, kitsch and artistic, all at once. Here is a film embodying all this, and considerably more, with so many layers and evocative connections (left to you, dear viewer), that it can be watched multiple times without exhausting its riches.

* * *

Due to graphic images and suggestions of incest, murder, suicide, heart-impaling, lip-branding, finger slicing, and the suchlike, I could not in good faith recommend this for family viewing, nor for the Bible Belt. Otherwise, get thee to a video store and rent!

If you're interested in other cult movie recommendations, check out On the Offbeaten Track, my Top Ten Cult Films: http://www.epinions.com/content_2916262020


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age