Film: My Winnipeg
By Chris Hawthorne • Jul 30th, 2008 • Section: Film, Reviews
My Winnipeg
Melbourne International Film Festival (full coverage here)
July 27 and August 8, 2008
It’s weird, darkly funny, and intensely personal. Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is a curious beast; a twisted cacophony of documentary, narrative and travelogue.
The film follows Maddin’s attempted extrication from his hometown, a place now so embroiled in his psyche that it’s reached a boiling point: either he goes or his mind does.
This separation – so clinically impossible, purportedly – is the film’s impetus for what becomes an enthusiastically unconventional journey throughout Winnipeg’s, and thus Maddin’s, history. He decides, in a dreamy, half-sleep daze, that the only way to truly escape the snow-clad burg is to ‘film his way out of it’.
Maddin assembles a troupe of actors to play his family – an impressively daring experiment that fails, mostly. Forcing them to recap important events in his life, and demanding of himself an intense catharsis, Maddin paints a wonderful black and white picture of his youth, his town, and his problems. It’s assemblage is genuinely startling – a true collage of the filmmakers mind. It’s splintered, fractured, great stuff.
My Winnipeg coalesces fact and fiction in search of reasons for the town’s ‘magnetic pull’; a throughline represented by the tumult of a hurtling train that traverses Maddin’s history. It’s a journey that asks questions of a town that is losing its idiosyncrasies in a misguided attempt to appear modern. What is the cost? What is a town without its history? What is a town without its people?
Maddin asks these questions so wistfully, so subjectively, and so sardonically that he creates his own mythos; a town pared from reality just enough to embody another man’s memories.
It’s an entertaining ride, hyperactively structured and darkly comic, calling to mind more investigative excursions like Bowling for Columbine and Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden? There is, of course, one major disparagement: only half of it’s real.
It’s a unique blend of fantasy and reality: Yes, Winnipeg was once re-named Himmlerstadt for an elaborately staged Nazi invasion, No, Winnipeg doesn’t have ‘ten times the sleep-walking rate of any other city in the world’. These mistruths are played so beautifully that it’s rare not to crack a smile as the absurdity escalates.
All the while, we’re becoming increasingly aware, as Maddin is, to the one thing that defines a town: its memories. As an old store is demolished, it’s ‘murder’. A hockey stadium makes an ironic stand against its pending destruction. Winnipeg doesn’t want to change – it’s being forced to.
Shot like a silent film, My Winnipeg is disjointed, jarring and beautiful. The visuals are inherently expressionist – flickering, grainy shots, camp interstitials, glaring faux-subliminal messages. At times the editing is so brisk it’s almost offensive, as rising rag-time music plays to some the film’s more spectacular sequences.
Ultimately, though, it’s Maddin himself that is most impressive. His droll, rhythmic narration provides for the film a foundation on which his cinema is free to play. It’s like listening to a freshly written play. It’s razor sharp, acerbic and always entertaining.
My Winnipeg, for all its bravado, is not a perfect film. As the film follows several tangents it’s naturally prone to getting a little distracted – and while some of these distractions are entertaining, some aren’t. The fragrant repetition of phrases can get a little irritating, and some sequence are too dizzyingly concocted.
All in all though, My Winnipeg is interesting, exciting filmmaking. Maddin invites you into his white world that brims with a universal curiosity; who are we, where did we come from, and why are we the way we are?
Click here for Laneway’s full coverage of the Melbourne International Film Festival.
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