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My Winnipeg (2007)

Director: Guy Maddin

Time Out rating

Average user rating

7 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

This funny, idiosyncratic ‘docu-fantasia’, as the filmmaker calls it, on the hometown of wacky and wonderful Canadian cineaste Guy Maddin offers as much an insight into the playful – and mother-obsessed – inner workings of the pre-occupations and imagination of the director of ‘Careful’ and ‘The Saddest Music in the World’ as it does an historical ‘psycho-geography’ of Manitoba’s ever-frozen capital city.

Commissioned by the Canadian Documentary Channel, and screening at the centre of this month’s BFI retrospective of Maddin’s films, it opens – in typically teasing and drolly provocative manner – with a period shot of a reclining female nude. That image is a defiant testament to both Maddin’s faithfully unorthodox attitude to conventional structure and his swooning affection for 1920s black-and-white imagery.

What follows are sundry archive material, back-projected reconstructions, animated inserts,
TV-soap deconstructions and anachronistic subtitles. All of which is cast by Maddin as a reverie, an unreliable memoir delivered by a silent, somnambulant train traveller played by Maddin regular Darcy Fehr and intoned by the ‘always lost, always befuddled’ auteur himself.
Yet among the camp exclamations, tongue-in-cheek historiography, and Freudian casebook of autiobiographical musings, an affecting, dreamy, Chris Marker-esque, ciné-essay emerges of the social and industrial history of this workers’ town of railyards, forked rivers and ‘Bolshevik’ revolutions.

This is deepened by the 50 year old’s angry lament for the demise of the old landmarks – the Happy Land fun-fair, Eaton’s Dept Store, his hockey manager father’s beloved Winnepeg Arena. This combines with the director’s unfailing ability to come up with extraordinary, occasionally transcendent, marriages of sound and sublime imagery to provide an engaging and subtly confessional love-poem to the home Maddin may never have quite successfully ‘filmed his way out of’.

Author: Wally Hammond 2008-07-01 12:36:32

Time Out London Issue 1976, July 3 - 9 2008

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User reviews of this film

brian said...

Posted on Aug 07 2008 12:52 ?????. As an "ex winnipeger" this film confirms I was right to leave wierdos like Madden behind. The place is full of them. As a film it might just be of obscure interest in the city itself but otherwise no way... eh?
At least Government of Canada funds film... but this?
The only unexplained reference i can add is that when the Eatons Bldg was knocked down the mayor and some associates were Gay. This might explain the Paddlewheel men's contest. The paddlewheel is a restaurant on top of the Bay bldg.

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Paul McCulloch said...

Posted on Aug 07 2008 02:02 This movie starts off slowly, making you go "why am I here?" But as it gains momentum you are sucked into Maddin's dream world. He certainly catches the spirit of the city, and it makes me long to return back to our shared hometown.

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Babbles said...

Posted on Jul 25 2008 16:45 Aren't directors supposed to make a good film before everybody calls them an auteur and has festivals to celebrate them. This guy (and everybody who likes him) is a complete waste of time.

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Steve Evans said...

Posted on Jul 18 2008 16:46 Like watching paint dry - but slower. The Canadian tax-payers must be seething at what became of their money.

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Neil Pearson said...

Posted on Jul 14 2008 10:03 Weird, wacky and wonderful. I visited Winnipeg 20 years ago during the winter and this film certainly evokes memories of a trip to a city that left me feeling some wonderment at exactly why the city was there in the first place and at the same time admired the stoic people who endure the interminable perma-frost winters. Though the film has some fallow patches it is never less than intriguing and wryly amusing. If you have never been to Winnipeg, go see this film and you may find yourself at least thinking of doing so, if only to find out whether it really is as Maddin paints it. Ignore the first imbecilic review here, that's for sure!

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Kevin Donnelly said...

Posted on Jul 08 2008 21:25 This has got to be the biggest pile of self indulgent crap since Europa in the early 90s. Thanks for reminding me of it with the article on Tartan Films. Given how difficult it is for most people to get films made, how did this ever see the light of day? I was almost cheering when his favourite city landmarks were knocked down as I can only hope he suffered as much as I did in watching his douglas hurd of a film. Avoid like the plague. if you want to go and see a decent b+w film with some wit and originality try In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

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sally wilton said...

Posted on Jul 07 2008 11:41 Guy Maddin's voice must be hypnotic. My boyfriend fell asleep after 15 minutes, I went in and out of a doze throughout the last hour and many others in the cinema appeared to be sleeping. Although interesting it seems it definately had a dream like quality.

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