Out of Frame: My Winnipeg
 An unnamed couple takes a romantic stroll among the frozen horse-heads. It'll all make perfect sense -- maybe -- after you've seen Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. |
It's not really a documentary. It's not exactly a memoir. It is ingenious and poetic. Frequently it's apeshit hilarious. But, like, what the hell is this thing?
Guy Maddin’s dreamy, beguiling My Winnipeg opens with the iconoclastic filmmaker employing the most loathsome directorial tactic there is: The camera fixes on the face of his leading lady while we hear him giving her line readings. Nothing, nothing more offends an actor’s ear than when a director tells them to say the line exactly like this. No prob, though, because the actress here is Maddin’s mother. Except she’s not his mother, she’s an actress named Ann Savage. And if contradiction is a problem for you, My Winnipeg is most decidedly not your movie.
Give in to Maddin’s “docu-fantasia,” though, and you'll find your adventurousness rewarded tenfold. Ostensibly a first-person account of the filmmaker's last attempt to leave behind his lifelong hometown —“the heart of the heart of the continent” in his lilting, alliterative narration -- it's really Maddin's mash note to the place, one sprinkled liberally with fun facts about the sleepy city's history. Along with some other stuff that — I’m guessing here, folks — Maddin just made up. Indeed, to go through and fact-check some of his more outlandish claims, like that his mom used to star in a daily suicide soap-opera called Ledge Man wherein the main character almost leapt to his death five times a week for years; or that Winnipeg’s mayor used to judge the über-gay Golden Boy contest and then offer the winners cushy jobs in his office, would be a fun project, though probably exhausting and definitely contrary to the spirit of the enterprise.
I don’t know Maddin’s prior work, but I'm told the entrancing editorial technique he uses here of combining well-chosen archival footage with newly shot stuff manipulated to make it look old — and, hilariously, with silent-movie title cards — is part of his standard filmic vocabulary. He certainly operates like no one else I can think of; Orson Welles’s F for Fake is the only other hoaxumentary (focumentary?) I’ve ever seen that’s remotely like this, and Welles’ adventurous editing of that picture seems a natural precursor to Maddin’s own impressionistic style.
Welles’ brilliant film — the only picture other than Citizen Kane that he ever completed to his satisfaction — was initially received as another of Welles’s colossal fuckups upon its initial release in 1974; it’s now hailed as a masterpiece. But in an age when “reality” TV rules the airwaves and Oprah self-righteously lambastes James Frey for making up bits of his autobiography, Maddin’s film, for all its wry shout-outs to the silent era, couldn't possibly be more timely.
I doubt it’s his main intent to satirize the dreary reenactments and reality shows that hold such dominion over American TV, but at least one of his stunts works like gangbusters on that level: Sensing a need to solve some mystery of identity rooted in his childhood, Maddin rents out his childhood home from its current owner, and convinces his mother-who-isn’t to move back into it with him for a month. But his brothers are too old to recreate their roles, so he hires two teenage actors to fill in. At the last second, the woman who now lives in the house refuses to leave, so she too becomes a part of the reconstructed family. Just to keep things thoroughly confused, Maddin is himself played by an actor — not just in this section of the film, but throughout.
The rest of the movie plays like a promotional video from the Greater Winnipeg Conventions and Tourism Bureau, assuming that everyone in the Bureau observes a strict diet of moose meat and hallucinogenic drugs, and that Winnipeg is located somewhere in the Bizarro World. (Oh, right. Canada.) And so: Taxi companies that travel only via secret byways! Frozen horse-heads with aphrodisiac properties! Old signage graveyards! "Urine, breast milk, and sweat: the hockey industry's Holy Trinity of odors." And then there's Maddin's observation-as-mantra that Winnipeg's shape suggests a woman's unclothed lap. (I can kind of see it. Okay, actually I can't see it, really, at all. But it is absolutely the most original rationale for female nudity onscreen since, well, ever.)
It’s a tribute to the singular wavelength of Maddin’s humor, and to the dizzying inventiveness of his storytelling, that a film supposedly inspired by a lifetime of failed attempts to leave his hometown kind of makes you want to visit.
My Winnipeg (85 minutes) opens today at the AFI Silver Theater. See the trailer here; buy tickets here. It pairs well with Realisms, the just-opened second half of the Hirshhorn Museum’s visionary The Cinema Effect exhibit, with which it is spiritually simpatico. Unrated; contains frontal female nudity in a cartographic context. Navigational discretion advised.