Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of his hometown commissioned by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms, once and for all, with his fever stream of memories (real and fabricated) inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!”
“Sleepwalking, sleepchugging.” This is how Maddin’s voiceover at one point describes the peculiarly narcoleptic denizens of Winnipeg moving through their days and nights. The phrase is an apt descriptor for the tone of the film: it’s not just groggy, it’s intoxicated, often frustratingly so. One could be generous, and praise Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness, where so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk.
One specific drunk, actually. Rarely allowing one image stand on its own for more than ten frames or so before dissolving in something new to see, generally dictated more by pattern than a linear thought, Maddin unravels his yarn in psychedelic, kaleidoscopic layers that seem a few years advanced down the timeline from his usual silent era influences. He’s basically playing at being a Busby Berkeley for the chronically depressed and/or cheerfully repressed.
“The forks, the lap, the fur,” Maddin moans, conflating the topography of his hometown with his mother’s birth canal and the comic-violent car accident that may or may not have involved the dissolution of his sister’s virginity. Maddin can’t quite remember how it all went down, and, determined to sort one or two things out before giving up the ghost town for good, he rents his childhood home, hires actors to play his mother and siblings, an proceeds to mount deadpan recreations of the boyhood memories by which he’s most haunted.
The reenactments star aged noir siren Ann Savage as Maddin’s mother, here recast as the female lead of Ledge Man, Winnipeg’s (fictional) only local television production. Ledge Man, Maddin tells us, comes on every afternoon, and his mother never misses a chance to see herself on the small screen. Every episode is roughly the same: a young man (played by Darcy Fehr, the actor who sleeps as Maddin in the train sequences) stands on a ledge outside his mother’s window, threatening to end it all; the proud, resilient old bat spends the length of the episode talking him into coming in. As Mrs. Maddin, Savage watches herself as Mama Ledge Man with wide, glazed eyes, enraptured over her own power over the boy. In his voiceover, Maddin refers to her simply as “Mother,” and when it comes time to direct her, he’s sure she’s playing a power game. “Just to show me who’s boss, she’ll transpose a line,” he sneers. “Anything to flub a take.”
That Oedipal tug-of-war (and Maddin’s masochistic resignation to it: “Her lap, a magnetic pull, a direction from which I can’t turn for long…”) is the closest thing My Winnipeg’s blur of personal history and fake history has to a connecting narrative string. The further Maddin drifts from the family reenactments, the more tenuous that string becomes, and though the latter half’s memorials to Winnipeg’s dying landmarks and “game playing reveries lost in time” offer both melancholic beauty and a few good jokes, after a short 80 minutes it feels like we’ve seen two films.
A review of My Winnipeg published earlier this week ruined a good 24 hours of my life. I sat at the bar that night and railed: “This is it––contrarianism has gone too far!!!” My friends rolled their eyes a bit but humored me. Yes, I’ve seen My Winnipeg three times since in premiered at Toronto last fall and consider myself an unabashed (though not uncritical) Guy Maddin fan. But I didn’t care that the review was negative; I cared that it suggested that even contemplating My Winnipeg as something worth contemplating is a waste of time.
“[N]o aggravated efforts of either elevation or condemnation are warranted here,” sniffed Reverse Shot’s Andrew Tracy, in a review that nonetheless devoted over 900 words to Winnipeg, most given over to skepticism regarding Maddin as a critically beloved character. The actual complaints offered were, as promised, less than strenuously argued. One gripe had to do with Maddin’s sexually ambiguous filmic mode of address, and the supposedly incongruous fact that in real life, he apparently only likes to **** women. This makes him the only artist––as far as I know, ever––to either work out anxieties and alternate, amorphous desires in their work rather than in their real worlds, or to employ a politicized stylistic mode out of context.
What follows is a condemnation of Maddin’s use of “cheap irony” at the expense of “serious irony”, the refusal to say anything either political or deeply critical about sexuality, the fact that “for all the polymorphous perversion on display throughout his films, there is little about the Maddin oeuvre that genuinely touches upon the erotic.” In short: Maddin doesn’t mean it. But whose to say that farce is necessarily insincere? If My Winnipeg succeeds in painting home as where the heart of wildly narcissistic delusion is, it’s largely because it deflates that delusion just enough by using a collage of self-indulgent lies and confession and tastes curated to personal preference not as a defense mechanism, but as an offense.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth