My Winnipeg | Guy Maddin, 2008
“Winnipeg. Winnipeg, Winnipeg. Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg…” So begins Guy Maddin’s ninth feature film and quaint tribute to his home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba. My Winnipeg is by far the most personal of Maddin’s work to date, lacking the abstract blurriness of Brand Upon the Brain but excelling thanks to a certain breed of self-analysis that the director has long-since perfected. Indeed if Brand Upon the Brain was born out of artistry, My Winnipeg has been born out of love for a single place and everything it stands for. While the concept here may sound relatively straightforward, any experiencers of Maddin’s unique approach to filmmaking would assume it is anything but. Such an assumption would be correct, of course, as all autobiographical traits are handled in a refreshingly playful manner by Maddin. He drafts in fellow Winnipegger Darcy Fehr to play himself and pulls the aged Hollywood actress Ann Savage out of her 25-year retirement to play his own Mother. Maddin’s approach to detailing his own, snowbound place of birth is a sardonic but loving one. He reacts scornfully to the city’s decision to tear down several old and memorable buildings, yet at the same time shares with us his wonder at Winnipeg’s famed back roads and old-world charm.
Watching My Winnipeg I couldn’t help but be reminded of the American author Bill Bryson’s semi-autobiographical novel The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Both book and film take an attentive yet rather derisive look back at a childhood in the fifties/sixties, questioning some of the aspects of life that so many took for granted back then. Maddin, like Bryson goes into great detail when concerning his hometown and its traditions. Both writer and filmmaker seem almost obsessively interested in the smaller headlines, the kind of headlines that help define a town. There is a single sequence in My Winnipeg for example that talks about an incident at Winnipeg’s Whittier Park in 1926 where a stable fire caused a stampede of horses to – with nowhere else to run – plunge headlong into a freezing river. The evidence of their short-lived terror could be seen upon their faces the following morning, and their frozen heads would remain a bizarre tourist attraction of sorts for the remainder of Winnipeg’s long winter that year. Maddin goes on to comment on the romantic walks and subsequent baby boom that the so-titled Horses’ Heads inspired. “Humans born of horses”; the closing line to a sequence that helps illustrate Maddin’s morbid curiosity and blackened sense of humour, two aspects that drive the film along.
Our Rating:
