Guy Maddin has been making semi-autobiographical films for
his whole career, in that he's been telling stories informed by the old movies
and forgotten folktales he soaked up over decades of lying on his Winnipeg
couch in unrepentant sloth. In recent years—in odd, plotless exercises
like Brand Upon The Brain! and Cowards Bend The Knee—Maddin has started to drop
the "semi" and has been more directly referencing his own life. Now, in the
bizarre and singularly delightful My Winnipeg, Maddin offers a docu-history of
his hometown, entangled with memories of his childhood. Or so he claims. Unless
Winnipeggers are really allowed by civic law to carry the keys to all their old
homes, some facts in My Winnipeg have probably been fudged.
And yet, even though much of My Winnipeg is overtly ludicrous—from the
corrupt judging of male beauty pageants in The Hudson's Bay Company's "Paddle
Room" to Maddin's memories of a locally produced TV series about an overly
sensitive man who spends every episode out on a ledge, threatening to kill
himself—the movie still touches on real feelings of loss and regret.
Utilizing a mix of stock footage, home movies, puppetry, and
rear-projection-aided reenactments, Maddin reflects on the stores that have
closed, the hockey teams that have left town, and the historical conflicts that
have been forgotten. Maddin's narration, halfway between noir bravado and Beat
poetry, gives the same weight to fantastical conjecture about nude romps in the
halls of government and to his memories of growing up above his family's beauty
parlor, smelling of "female vanity and desperation."
Maddin's funniest and most poignant idea has him hiring
actors to recreate scenes from his childhood, such as the daily, Sisyphean
ordeal of straightening the rug in the front hallway. My Winnipeg is full of striking visual
metaphors, as Maddin compares a confluence of rivers to his mother's crotch,
and points out how piled-high snowdrifts lead Winnipeg's perpetually sleepy
citizens through an inescapable maze. But nothing beats the shot of Maddin's
fake family lounging around a reconstruction of his old living room, leaning
casually against the exhumed corpse of his father. Maddin talks at length about
Winnipeg's hidden layers, but what makes My Winnipeg perhaps his best film to date is
that so much of it is right out in the open.