Guy Maddin’s latest, My Winnipeg, is a phantasmagoric trip through Winnipeg history, parts travelogue, cultural biography and Freudian nightmare. It opens with “Guy Maddin” (played by Darcy Fehr) dozing on a train car slowly winding its way outside Winnipeg to places unknown. He has decided to excommunicate himself from the city he has called home for so many years in order to pursue his fortunes elsewhere.
Winnipeg becomes a mantra, as the narrator’s poetic dialogue echoes and repeats through the film. He begins to question his need to move beyond Winnipeg’s borders as he ruminates on strange tales of local seances, strikes and theme parks. Lurking in the corners is his mother, emotionally distant and disapproving. Maddin’s desire to return to the womb — or his fascination with it — is emphasized repeatedly with repetitions of “mother” and “lap” while the camera circles in on a vagina.
A little blunt, but otherwise Maddin (who also directed The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain!) is content to free associate in more playful terms, as he stumbles throughout the city (a twining mass of “arteries”), commenting on old family haunts and conspiracy theories. An elegiac tone is carried throughout (he sees Arlington Bridge as groaning with a “colossal arthritis”), but his bizarre flourishes, staged soap opera-like digressions and dialogue (pondering the “biomagnetic influence of bison”) are hilarious.
Partway through the film, he hires actors to play his family, re-enacting key scenes and memories from his adolescence. It becomes a strange social experiment, a rare chance to “vivisect his childhood,” as he puts it.
The re-enactments are part of a contraption that consists of found footage, old newsreels and shadow puppets. Shot entirely in black-and-white, My Winnipeg only flips to colour in two brief sections: a diatribe against the new MTS Centre (or “empty” centre, as he calls it) and the destruction of the Winnipeg Arena. He sees the MTS Centre as a tasteless boil of modernity set against the beauty of the old city architecture. The razing of the Winnipeg Arena serves as a requiem to his father, an arena worker who died when the old hockey league joined the NHL, leaving many employees behind. Maddin claims he was actually born there — certainly his ideas of masculinity were, with hazy images of showering men and urinals rendered both erotic and threatening.
Maddin’s “snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg” is seen as both a Canadian paradise and a smothering frozen mass. Preternatural, puffy white snow is everywhere, and a pervasive cold creeps into your bones as the film progresses. Whether fantasy or chilly reality, it’s wonderfully conceived and hypnotizing, and a heartfelt tribute to his beloved city.
