Review: My Winnipeg (4./5)

Guy Maddin, an elusive poet of dreams, is frustratingly brilliant with ‘My Winnipeg’ – probably the most unique cinematic experience this year

My Winnipeg
(Guy Maddin):
Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin.
Running time: 80 minutes.

There comes a point in My Winnipeg, the new film from Guy Maddin, when your brain taps your arm in the dark and whispers politely into your ear: what is this you’re making me watch? This takes some explaining. Is My Winnipeg a documentary? I think so. But it seems made up? Indeed. Is it a dream? Probably. Is it autobiography? I’ll come back to you on that. If there’s one certainty, it’s that it is the work of Maddin, Canada’s ambassador of the eccentric and kindred spirit of David Lynch. If Maddin turned his weird alchemy to food, he would, perhaps, be a Heston Blumenthal: his films are an optical à la carte of snail porridge or bacon and egg ice cream.
They are yucky-delicious. They dangle you upside down and work parts of the brain you never knew you had.
My Winnipeg is what Maddin calls a ‘docu-fantasia’, and it revels in quirk and whim. Ostensibly, it is an homage to the city where he grew up. But it doesn’t unspool like conventional drama, teased out of a great city, like Woody Allen’s panegyric Manhattan. This is the Winnipeg that exists in the memory of its narrator, a kind of psycho-geography where a city and its ancient ghosts mingle with Maddin’s past and whatever else he throws into the pot – frozen horses’ heads atop a frosted lake anyone?
The tone of the film is established like a somnambulist’s dream. A man (played by Darcy Fehr) sleeps fitfully on a train and the film floats out of his agitation, a jittery fantasy set in black and white. This Winnipeg, he tells us, is so sleepy, and the soundtrack, rattling with train clackety-clack, lulls you into hypnosis. The screen washes with snow, like ectoplasm conjuring ghosts from the narrator’s past: family incidents, old news reels, and events (recreated or imagined?) by Maddin which look like moments from an old Buñuel surrealist film, or a Louis Feuillade segment. (He shoots on digital yet captures the feel of 1920s avant-garde cinema; his faux-documentary style comes in the tradition too of Buñuel’s Land Without Bread.)
Sitting on top of the noirish images is the voice of Maddin himself, a hardboiled unreliable narrator, a pulp poet of the night. We are at the whim of this strange personality. “I’ve often wondered what effect growing up in a hair salon had on me,” he says, in a mock revisit of his mother’s hair salon. The camera captures hairspray like sensual mist and it made me think: perhaps all film students should spend at least a term in hairdressing school.
Winnipeg must be the coldest city in the world. It is easily the strangest. His spectral tour includes a graveyard of signs – a municipal order forbids the scrapping of city signage; he tells us of two taxi companies, one for the main streets, the other for Winnipeg’s ‘black arteries’, roads not on maps and only known by word of mouth. And then there’s those horses’ heads, like “eleven knights on a great white chessboard.” Race-track tragedy or surrealist prank?
Everything here is frosted with death: Winnipeg’s famed ice hockey stadium is being demolished. Maddin’s father worked there and our narrator tells us he was born in the locker-room. You can sense genuine anger from Maddin at the tearing down of history to be met by bland corporatism. But moments that are more personal feel less heartfelt: he rents his childhood house and re-stages family scenes with a mound under a rug representing “his exhumed father.”
The nightly ritual of straightening the hall mat, with his mother issuing instructions from the side, has a wacky comic surreality. But these family scenes are never poignant, perhaps because something seems amiss: the woman he tells us is his mother is really Ann Savage, a film noir actress from the 1940s. She stalks proceedings with a hawk-eyed matriarchal glare. Savage has a moment where she lies talking to Cameron (Brendan Cade), Maddin’s long-dead 16-year-old brother. But the moment doesn’t reach you, and the film, despite its verve, tickles rather than floors.
There is a coldness here that has nothing to do with Winnipeg’s northern chill. It comes from Maddin’s arch playfulness. He plays cheeky mythmaker with both Winnipeg and his own biography. Is any of it real? The question jumbles the mind. Does it matter? Probably not. Maddin is frustratingly brilliant, an elusive poet of dreams, and My Winnipeg is probably the most unique cinematic experience this year.