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Maddin-ing Movies
Despite his decidedly experimental credentials, Canadian cinema maverick Guy Maddin has more in common artistically with Quentin Tarantino than his own fans might want to admit: if a century of cinema hadn’t preceded them, they might’ve been at a total loss when assembling their own creations.

In Maddin’s case, it is more accurately the roughly three decades prior to the advent of synchronous sound that inform his simultaneously retrograde and resolutely contemporary aesthetic; just as motion pictures infancy straddled the Victorian and modern eras, his feature films from Tales From The Gimli Hospital (1988) and Archangel (1990) through Careful (1992) and continuing with Dracula Pages From a Virgins Diary (2002) seem to belong in an historical limbo betwixt a quaint past and a dodgy future. Its here in Maddin’s world that you’ll encounter archaic-yet-familiar cinematic trademarks like frantic Soviet montages, leering Teutonic carnality, hyperbolic Hollywood intertitles, and turn-of-the-century societal upheavals, all with a twenty-first-century undercurrent of moral turpitude.

A recent installation piece by Maddin, for example, hearkens to the cinematograph’s earliest incarnations as hand-cranked nickelodeon peep shows: Cowards Bend The Knee made the rounds at various film festivals in 2003 within a video apparatus with ten viewing holes, each presenting a different chapter of a tale where Memento meets The Hands of Orlac meets Shampoo meets The House of Wax meets Slapshot. The reception was so positive, Cowards will be screened as an hour-long feature in theaters starting late this summer. But whereas sexual desire has always been a driving force among the characters in Maddins surreal tales, here it is the voyeuristic desires of the spectator that propel events to their calamitous resolution.

Among those spectators is Maddin himself, as he has confessed in press materials that Cowards represents a sort of self-mocking and exposing autobiographical wish-fulfillment. The main character is named Guy Maddin. but played by Darcy Fehr, and the first chapter’s opening imagery suggests the films world is contained within one man’s sperm sample, so any doubts that the director is situating himself within Coward’s erotic exploits are quickly dismissed. Those who might object to a strong degree of sexual content in films might have much to decry here, as the nudity quotient (for both sexes) is higher than in any of his previous works, but Maddins inserted all the flesh gratuitously for a specific reason to remind us that those early nickelodeons often had pornographic content, hence the seedy contemporary connotation of the term peep show.

While many of the chapter headings consciously imitate the titillating innuendo from motion picture’s naughtier times (“A Squeeze of the Hand,” “Wax Tryst,” “Sperm Players”), the grainy black-and-white tale is still standard-issue Maddin phantasmagoria: hockey enthusiast Guy gets a blow to the noggin on the ice and the resultant amnesia brings his id front and center. Abandoning his pregnant girlfriend at the abortion clinic and submitting to the manipulations of a highly photogenic femme fatale named Meta who seeks revenge for her fathers murder, Guy begins a killing spree after being convinced the hands of Meta’s father have been transplanted onto him.

Thus begins an expressionistic tragedy in which Maddin unleashes his usual bag of visual tricks: jump cuts, inexact focus, iris shots, verbose title cards, single light sources and extensive shadows, the occasional sound effect, infrequent color tints, and changes in speed. It is always assured filmmaking and consistently whimsical in even its darkest moments (blood stains in the shape of maple leaves, for example), but the highly suggestible and erotically uninhibited Guy is doomed from the start. Viewers can hardly feel pity for him, however, as Maddin’s films never draw on genuine emotion or even use natural exteriors. In their self-contained, synthetic narratives it is only cinema itself that Maddin references in Cowards (his temptress isn’t named Meta for nothing), which may thrill the most diehard film buffs but should leave cold anyone who prefers a little moral consequence with their entertainments.

The latter group I would thus direct to Maddin’s latest full-fledged feature, The Saddest Music in the World, which attempts something resembling metaphor in its convocation of numerous national cultures. This is a rare collaborative endeavor for Maddin as the script by Maddin and George Toles is based on another screenplay by The Remains of the Day’s Kazuo Ishiguro. The pan-Canadian elements here also bear noting. Music is produced by Atom Egoyan, another of the Great White North’s film luminaries, and stars Mark McKinney, late of TV’s Kids in the Hall.

And instead of hands being inadvertently amputated, this time it is a pair of legs that meet with premature detachment; those of Isabella Rossellini’s Lady Port-Huntly, Winnipeg’s own Queen of Beer on the Prairies. Rossellini is the mogul of Musket Beer during the Depression, and is profiting handsomely from her southern neighbor’s recent institution of Prohibition. To further improve sales, she proposes a live radio competition in which contestants from around the world perform the most melancholy musical selections from their country’s repertoire. Worldwide suffering is at a premium right now, you see, and Winnipeg is been named the world capital of sorrow for the fourth year running by the London Times. To the winner goes twenty-five thousand Depression-era dollars, and to Musket Beer increased revenue, for the sadder the audience gets, the more beer they buy.

McKinney shows up as the United States entry to this lachrymal Olympics. He plays a producer of musical spectaculars named Chester who envisions a series of numbers that are predictably vulgar, obvious, full of gimmicks and yet sassy, and he is counting on his romantic history with Lady Port-Huntly to ease his way through the preliminary rounds. Accompanying him is Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), a doe-eyed and elfin self-proclaimed nymphomaniac who, like Chester, seems to have shelved any and all personal regrets away in some unreachable subconscious vault. She also nurses within herself a tapeworm who telepathically counsels her on every promiscuous course of action. These representatives of American values display an unwavering optimism and insatiable libidos even as they find themselves virtually penniless in a perpetual winter; they even engage in surreptitious manual stimulation as a Native American medium advises Chester look to your miseries, or you are a dead man. 

The callow Chester is a native Canadian, it turns out, but he has since embraced Yankee razzle dazzle and historical myopia; his stage productions in these head-to-head musical duels illustrate tragedies like the Lusitania and the San Francisco earthquake with all of the showmanship but only manufactured sentiment. His father (David Fox), meanwhile, performs on behalf of Canada, singing on his knees of all the young soldiers lost on the battlefield of the Great War on an upright piano toppled onto its back.. (He figures prominently in Lady Port-Huntlys past amorous exploits as well.)

Then there is Chesters brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), who has conversely claimed Serbia as his new homeland, the country which birthed the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassin and sent world history spiraling into a new era of anguish and anxiety; appropriately, Roderick dresses all in black and has developed a hypersensitivity to light and touch. He is the avatar of a sick Europe, playing on his cello a tune mourning the death of his son and the disappearance of his wife, a woman who, he discovers, looks exactly like Narcissa! Music’s intrigue therefore extends beyond the fortunes of the contest, and the cavalcade of misery transpires both on and offstage.

Whereas Cowards was a silent production, Music wouldn’t exactly work without an audio track, especially when Spanish flamenco dancers go up against pygmy funereal performers who lacerate themselves onstage to display bloody tears, or when Siam’s flutist takes on Mexico’s mariachis; Chester appropriately recruits the losing teams into his own troupe each round until the final number combines pan pipes, sitars, and banjos into a gaudy musical melting pot. Maddin employs familiar optical effects like fuzzy frame edges, two-strip color schemes, a grainy, scratched, and faded film stock, and rear projection in this eventual clash between the Old World (Roderick) and the New (Chester), with the ageless Rossellini and her implacable cosmopolitan accent exploiting it all for her own financial gain.

As usual, Maddin has concocted a motion picture that looks as though it were exhumed from some long-abandoned dusty archive, and one that again only follows the logic of its own internal interconnections. To the uninitiated, Music will come across as the most peculiar of curiosities, with just enough brio to propel you to the end. But to those who have followed Maddin’s career from his earliest features, it feels strangely similar to the artistic trajectory of Pedro Almod circa Kika: after cranking out several films with a consistently idiosyncratic style, one wonders if it isn’t just about played out. When a film’s pleasures stem solely from formal conceits, they’re arguably as hollow as Chester’s own obvious pageantry. Music ultimately comes to resemble to no small degree the pair of beer-filled glass prosthetic legs Chester’s father fashions for Lady Port-Huntly: striking and unique, but transparently artificial and ephemeral.

J. Alan Speer 6/6/2004