Blame Canada

My Winnipeg Directed by Guy Maddin at IFC Center

There’s always been something a little preternatural about Guy Maddin’s movies (Isabella Rossellini’s beer-filled glass legs in The Saddest Music in the World spring to mind), and My Winnipeg—billed as a “docu-fantasia”—is no different. But this time Maddin both exploits and explains his skewed vision. A mostly black-and-white exploration of his own childhood and the history of his hometown, My Winnipeg reveals a twisted city filled with episodes in its history straight out of a Charles Addams cartoon.

When someone grows up on tales of stampeding racehorses being frozen in a river, leaving just their rearing heads above the ice, how can they not be a little off-kilter in their sensibilities? Especially when so many of the townspeople used the macabre, accidental installation art as a trysting place and picnic destination.

But no town, no matter how strange (and Winnipeg is certainly that), can affect someone as much as his family. In between revealing tales of Winnipeg’s eccentric past, Maddin films actors portraying his own family in the house he grew up in, sublet for a month specifically for that purpose. Adding to the surrealness is the woman he sublet from hovering around, stoutly refusing to leave. And what saves the family sequences from utter navel-gazing is both the brilliant dialogue and the inspired casting of cult favorite Ann Savage as Maddin’s mother. Famous almost solely for her role in the B-noir Detour, Savage spits out her lines with a withered aplomb that must have been taxing to coax from her, an ordeal discreetly hinted at in a sequence of Maddin feeding Savage her dialogue, and later, when the voiceover describes his “mother’s” subconscious refusal to learn her lines.

And most of the film’s success lies in Maddin's narration, which manages to walk a tightrope between utter earnestness and blackly comedic irony, turning his clunkiest lines into something approaching poetry and doing full service to his zingers. Lulled by repetitions on both screen and soundtrack (at its worst, the voiceover comes across as bad Hemingway), the audience is seduced into something approaching the “sleepwalking” residents of Winnipeg, a common affliction in that town. How anyone could ever be lulled into a deep sleep in that town, however, remains unclear. This is the place where city leaders held séances in the municipal building during the spirituality-crazed twenties and presided over male beauty pageants in The Paddlewheel, a den of sin and gambling. But their insistence on roaming the streets after dark becomes clearer as Maddin explores both the dark and comforting back roads of Winnipeg and the stubborn refusal on the local government’s part to honor the past. The narration becomes increasingly angry as the film takes a closer look at the buildings that affected Maddin and their eventual demolition. Gone is the department store that once dictated the shopping habits of everyone in town, replaced by a modern monstrosity that offers up nothing but the novelty of cheap newness in return. But Maddin saves most of his fury and regret for the destruction of the ice- hockey arena in which his father worked, even donning a hardhat to enjoy one last, on-camera piss in its urinal trough.

Early in the film, an old annual tradition of a treasure hunt through Winnipeg, in which a day of following various clues around town ended with the winner being presented with a one-way train ticket to another town. My Winnipeg itself is a lot like that treasure hunt, with Maddin peering behind doors and around corners with his camera to win a way out of his own past. But he should have known better, because no one, in the one hundred years of the treasure hunt, ever got on the train. And by the film’s end, Maddin seems less reluctant to stay in a town that he knows so well and holds so many secret skeleton keys to. As for us, we’d happily take a ticket to glorious, screwball Winnipeg.