Maddin holds the keys to perception
“I promised myself I would not try to make clones of Guy Maddin,” said Guy Maddin.
The acclaimed Canadian experimental filmmaker sounded self- effacingly sincere, speaking over Skype Wednesday afternoon from his Harvard office, where he is moulding the cinematic minds of the future.
But watching Maddin’s perception- warping new feature The Forbidden Room, which closes the Festival du nouveau cinéma on Saturday before opening in theatres on Friday, it’s hard to see how he could imbue his young charges with anything resembling a conventional view of the movie business.
Shot at Montreal’s Phi Centre and Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou, starring an intercontinental cast — Quebec’s Roy Dupuis, Karine Vanasse, Caroline Dhavernas and Sophie Desmarais, France’s Mathieu Amalric, the U. K.’ s Charlotte Rampling and Geraldine Chaplin — and co- directed with his former student Evan Johnson, the movie is a dreamlike trip through time, space and film history.
The sprawling epic features 17 interwoven tales, all firmly ensconced in Maddin’s mischievous sense of the surreal. A group of sailors is trapped in a submarine, eating flapjacks to suck oxygen from the air bubbles; an “aspiring lumberjack” ( Dupuis) plots the rescue of a damsel in distress ( Clara Furey) from a cave- dwelling gang called the wolves; a doctor ( Paul Ahmarani) falls in love with his female patient ( Dhavernas), who has broken a record number of bones in a motorcycle accident; Marv ( Louis Negin), a boisterous old guy in a robe, explains how to take a bath; a man ( Amalric) commits murder to avoid the embarrassment of forgetting his wife’s birthday; a psychiatrist takes advantage of a fellow passenger ( Vanasse) on a train.
It’s all shot on a variety of endangered film stocks and using a range of effects, giving the impression one has stumbled on an assemblage of found footage from a parallel universe.
“I don’t know what my movies are about until after two months of talking,” Maddin offered, playfully. “When I run out of truthful, honest answers, I start lying, and then I realize that the lies reveal more
than the truth. You can say anything when you’re lying, but there’s a curatorial decision when you’re picking one element of truth over another. Finally everything gets sorted out, and the playful lies I’ve told to be engaging actually reveal what it seems to be about.”
Right, then. Well, that clears things up, doesn’t it?
One theme that jumps out is the fraught dynamics between the sexes. The film is rife with stories of betrayal and abuse, which converge into a multi- layered statement on the questionable status quo.
“It could easily have been called The Suicide of Patriarchy,” Maddin said, emphasizing that none of what happens in his film is meant to be taken at face value.
“At Sundance, when i t first played, someone flagged it for inappropriate gender politics,” he said. “I was annoyed — not annoyed, but disappointed. We really thought this through carefully. The world does not need a bunch of alpha male, wanky, invertebrate male experimental filmmakers staring navel- ward and beyond. It needs some sort of cathartic purging.
“( The Forbidden Room) is like some gigantic, sprawling, exhausting mea culpa where viewers are washed up on shore having narrowly survived this narrative drowning, and they’re given this second chance at living life right, which may involve never watching another Canadian film or may involve dismantling the way we approach each other as genders.”
Maddin and Johnson collaborated closely throughout The Forbidden Room, which is an accompaniment to a “lost film Internet project” called Séances, to be released in the new year.
“I discovered, along with Evan, a motherlode of lost films, some of which were once projected on screen for millions, some of which were nominated for Academy Awards and made huge profits. Some were ( all but) destroyed after they were made, some were never realized. Certainly, they’re all part of the pop art form, and for some reason they were all forgotten.”
The Forbidden Room’s shoots at the Phi Centre and Centre Georges Pompidou were open to the public, making for a charged atmosphere as anywhere from a few to 100 people gathered at any given time to watch the work in progress, often with known actors putting themselves in uncomfortable positions.
“I was thrilled they were all up for the adventure,” Maddin said of his cast. “I didn’t expect it. I thought some of them would be more guarded about exposing themselves in these vulnerable moments.”
Chalk it up to Maddin’s reputation, and his enthusiasm. Ultimately, the project is about the magic of cinema, a mystical experience that, though it has changed significantly over the past century and change, retains its basic spirit.
“Séance is French for seating,” he said. “It’s also a word for film seating and for paranormal session seating, and it’s the same setup in both cases: a bunch of people sitting in the dark, looking at things that aren’t there, wanting to believe.”
At Sundance, when it first played, someone flagged it for inappropriate gender politics. I was annoyed — not annoyed, but disappointed.