Guy Maddin’s Careful Returns
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In Tolzbad, the fictional Alpine village that serves as the setting of Guy Maddin’s third feature, Careful (1992), citizens speak in a near-whisper and swallow any potential outburst of emotion for fear of setting off an avalanche. This is a “community of apple-cheeked villagers whose scrubbed faces belie a Freudian wasp’s nest of incestuous desire and sibling rivalry,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times when Careful screened at the New York Film Festival. “From its portentous between-scenes titles to the way the director bathes whole scenes in garish oranges and blues, Careful is one long and amusing pun on German Expressionistic film imagery, Freudian psychology, and quasi-Wagnerian storytelling, all carried to absurdist lengths.”
Starting Friday, New York’s Film Forum will present a weeklong run of a new restoration, and Maddin will be there on Friday and Saturday to talk about it. After Saturday’s Q&A, he’ll introduce Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), his Maddinized documentation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s interpretive performance of Bram Stoker’s immortal novel. Careful will also screen in Chicago before heading to Los Angeles and more cities throughout the summer.
“Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history,” wrote Dennis Lim in 2008. “His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed.” Careful “takes his penchant for artifice to an extreme.” Maddin “says he started out intending to make a ‘pro-incest’ movie and ended up with a ‘pro-repression’ one—it’s precisely this ambivalence about forbidden and frustrated desires, the recognition that repression is deranging and also its own kind of turn-on, that undergirds the erotic logic of Maddin’s films.”
“The restoration of Careful is wonderfully done, bringing out the at-once hyper-artificial and softly organic textures of his mise-en-scène, from plastic roses to moose antlers to mysterious aqua potions in glistening beakers,” writes Payton McCarty-Simas in the Brooklyn Rail. Dracula “takes artistic license to follow in the footsteps of silent feminist polemics like Häxan—down to the brood of horn-tailed demons twerking on Victorian bedposts. Most of the runtime is devoted to the vampiric seduction of Lucy Westenra (an effervescent and ferocious Tara Birtwhistle), whose libidinal repression drives her eagerly into the arms of the Prince of the Night. In the face of all this corseting, Maddin’s conclusion is a resounding, ‘No wonder!’”
Film Forum will also screen Maddin’s first two features, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) and Archangel (1990). In Tales, the friendship between two patients during a smallpox epidemic turns to rivalry as they compete for their nurses’ attention. Their enmity only intensifies when they learn that their paths have previously crossed in gruesome ways. Maddin “self-consciously borrows from dozens of sources, including radio dramas, Our Gang shorts, hygiene films, school plays, stag pictures, Universal horror, ethnographic documentaries, and the indie weirdness of John Waters and David Lynch,” wrote Noel Murray at the A.V. Club in 2002.
Archangel is also the name of a Russian town where a Canadian soldier who has lost a leg in the First World War arrives to mistake a woman for his deceased lover. She’s married to a Belgian who can’t remember he’s married to anyone at all. Archangel “offers something of a précis of narrative tropes and themes that would pervade Maddin’s cinema,” wrote Jake Cole for Slant a couple of years ago. “There’s the juxtaposition of archaic film form with more risqué sexual exhibition, the slipperiness of memory, and a notion of projection heavily indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” Reviewing Archangel for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: “What comes across is a fascinating fetishist delirium, where memories of remote war movies get recycled into something that’s alternately creepy and beautiful.”
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