Film

So long as he continues to shoot his psychodramas in an ancient, smeary style last used by Cecil B. DeMille, Canada’s Guy Maddin will always be attacked as a poseur. That’s too bad, because the films deserve better. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) employed its retro grammar—and a terrific troupe of ballet dancers—to fully evoke Bram Stoker’s somnambulant spell; Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), half tender self-reinvention and half sci-fi therapy, proved that Maddin is no mere nostalgist. In fact, he is a sly, self-scrutinizing one.

Making that point fully apparent, My Winnipeg is Maddin’s most personal film to date, narrated by the director himself, about his frigid hometown. As reminiscences go, it’s full of feeling but not to be taken literally. Maddin stages poetic shots of random sleepwalkers struggling lethargically against northern ennui. There are repetitive God’s-eye shots of converging rivers crosscut with a hairy vagina (“…the Forks, the lap, the fur…”), building comically on Maddin’s home-womb obsessions. When he does settle into some honest-to-goodness history, it’s to reflect on growing up above his mother’s salon: “a gynocracy…filled with the smells of female vanity and desperation.”

A lot of this is funny, and when Maddin’s “mother” (Savage) shows up to talk her son off a building ledge on their weekly suicide TV soap, you realize that he’s arriving at a kind of truth his own way. We’re not talking Roger & Me, but something equally as valid and town-proud: “the heart of the heart of the continent,” in his whispering words.