‘My Winnipeg’ | 3 ½ stars
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
Did you know:
•Winnipeg has 10 times a higher rate of sleepwalking than any other city. Residents typically carry keys to all their former homes and while in a somnambulant state may enter their old residences. Current homeowners must, by city ordinance, allow the nocturnal visitors to remain until they safely awaken.
•Winnipeg’s only locally produced TV show was “Ledge Man.” In each episode, a morose fellow stood on a high windowsill threatening to jump while his mother attempted to talk him down.
•In the winter of 1926, a racetrack fire sent horses fleeing into the Red River, where they drowned in the frigid water. Their frozen heads, extending from the ice sheet, were used as benches by skaters and young lovers until spring.
•During World War II, hundreds of civic leaders dressed in Nazi uniforms borrowed from a Hollywood studio and held “If Day,” running the city as a fascist state and rounding up undesirables. It was a gimmick to sell war bonds.
Whether these “facts” are true, fabrications or a combination of the two really doesn’t matter because “My Winnipeg” is a Guy Maddin movie. The Canadian may be the cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteur, and this love/hate tribute to his hometown is one of the year’s weirdest, most memorable 80 minutes of celluloid. (It opens today at the Tivoli.)
In this funny, absurdist and weirdly touching meditation on the past, Maddin (who is never seen but provides the sometimes conversational, sometimes poetic narration) gives us a guided tour of Winnipeg and his own psyche.
Shot in his trademark scratchy black and white (it blends so effortlessly with the old footage he cannibalizes that it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart) and brilliantly edited by John Gurdebeke, “My Winnipeg” glides effortlessly from civic subjects to the deeply personal.
We’re told one minute that all the city’s streets with women’s names were inspired by famous brothel madams; the next Maddin recalls how as a toddler he wandered onto the grounds of a Catholic girls’ school and was immediately surrounded by affectionate preteens in plaid skirts and kneesocks. Observing this phenomenon from crotch level appears to have had a profound effect on the future filmmaker.
Maddin laments the destruction of Winnipeg’s architectural heritage (“Demolition is one of our few growth industries”). He’s particularly incensed by the razing of the old hockey palace where his father was a team employee and where the filmmaker claims to have been born during a match. Maddin dismisses a newly erected arena as “a zombie in a cheap suit.”
For a man, Maddin has a distinctly feminine sensibility; “My Winnipeg” helps explain it. Maddin grew up over the beauty parlor run by his mother and aunt and was intoxicated by the sounds and smells of this “gynocracy.”
For one of the film’s nutsiest chapters Maddin attempts to relive his childhood by renting his family’s old apartment and populating it with actors portraying his siblings. Lording over them is his mother (played by Ann Savage, the B-movie actress made famous by the Poverty Row classic “Detour”), a font of crazy accusations and casual indifference.
Running throughout “My Winnpeg” is Maddin’s recurring theme of escape from “the heinous power of family and city.” But as much as he might want out, he’s stuck. Maddin still lives in Winnipeg. That’s where he makes his films. That’s where his past resides.
For all of our sakes, let’s hope he stays there.
‘MY WINNIPEG’ ★★★ 1/2
Director: Guy Maddin
Cast: Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin
No MPAA rating. Contains some language, brief nudity.
Running time: 1:20
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