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My Winnipeg


My Winnipeg

1


The Carriage

Guy Maddin is trying to 'film his way out' of his ice-clad hometown, charting its idiosyncrasies, its slumbering trends and exotic ‘gynocracies’, all the elements that have kept him its semi-willing prisoner, never letting him quite build the momentum to escape its peculiarly familiar folds.


The Gait

2
Like the train that houses our narrator, this film takes a while to pick up speed, but once running free, it chatters and chunters along like a coal-fired dream. Maddin’s personal journey through a city only slightly older than his grandmother is a tour-de-force of fabrication, history & emotional truth, all playfully mixed together with dreamlike verisimilitude.

Join him as he rushes past ‘Trash Hill’ festooned with tobogganing children. Watch dead men playing hockey, while frozen horse heads inspire a baby boom. His sensibilities are sometimes jaundiced and colourful like a bruise, but you can sense a preserved and willful knowledge in his story’s wild contusions.

Did the city's founding fathers really commission this, as the net would have it? If so they got a lot more than they bargained for. Endorsements formed from a ballet of semi-subliminal accusations, liminal pudendums, and charges of third-level masonry. It's all in there, along with various ectoplasmic recollections and electromagnetic buffalo. Positive snowprints lead us down uncharted paths, reversing expectations and personalising the unknown. The Nazi's invade his memories of sexual awakening, fuse with civic pride, then get held up as idols of disenchantment, before melting into the ‘increasingly important background’, as the next magic spell distills new wonders from the once innocuous-seeming town, of Winnipeg.

Rating =
-to-
, depending on your temperature & temperament.