Moving Pictures

Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg explores a world of surfaces beneath surfaces.

by Sam Adams

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Guy Maddin has so firmly established himself as a spinner of outlandish, implausible tales that the strangest thing he can do is tell the truth. My Winnipeg, the latest addition to his cabinet of curiosities, is hardly a documentary, but it does mix fact with fiction to a previously unheard-of degree.

A cracked cine-memoir, My Winnipeg is Maddin's farewell to his longtime hometown, part valedictory and part "so long, suckers!" It's an attempt to catalog the city's influence on him, and to try and escape it. Filmed in flickering black and white, the movie is framed by shots of a Maddin stand-in riding a dimly lit train car through the snowy Manitoba night, vainly trying to transgress its borders. Physical escape, Maddin concludes in his quizzical narration, is impossible, but then lightning strikes: "What if I film my way out of here?"

Maddin's Winnipeg is a world of surfaces beneath surfaces, like the subterranean rivers that purportedly run beneath the city's two main waterways. Below the city's frosty exterior lies a secret world, accessed by a populace who he claims are the world's foremost somnambulists. These sleepwalkers, he says, are invariably drawn to their childhood homes, where by municipal ordinance they must be admitted and allowed to rest until they come to their senses.

Maddin returns, trancelike, to his own home, which he rents out to film a month's worth of reenactments (or at least, he says he does, although the environment looks suspiciously like a soundstage). Employing Detour femme fatale Ann Savage as his mother, Maddin stages a series of mock-Freudian tableaux. In Winnipeg, he avers, the most popular local show is Ledge Man, a weekly drama in which a nervous would-be suicide is talked off a ledge by his overbearing mother — played, naturally, by Maddin's own maternal stand-in.

The beguiling oddity of this conceit almost conceals its deeper substance, but those who know Maddin's biography and watch closely will note that Maddin sets Ledge Man's peak popularity in the year when his brother killed himself (or at least, so he has repeatedly said, and with apparent sincerity). Maddin is such an amusing raconteur that it's easy to overlook the darker substance of his films, which lurks beneath their dazzling surfaces like an underground torrent. My Winnipeg is a fractured, multifaceted delight, but it's also a confessional, hidden in plain sight.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

My Winnipeg | Written and directed by Guy Maddin | An IFC Films release