Funny Guy
GUY MADDIN'S NAME earns a grin from film buffs because the very idea of Guy Maddin is funny. Over the past decade or more, as much of English-language commercial cinema has been subsumed by pre-fab blockbusters, leaden Oscar-baiting studio pictures and art house Controversies-of-the-Week, the Winnepeg-based Maddin has carved out his own unique niche directing the modern equivalent of silent and early-sound films. His filmography-which started with 1988's Tales from the Gimli Hospital and continued through 2002's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary and last year's weird musical talkie The Saddest Music in the World-consists of kooky yet feverish melodramas, stylistically rooted between 1916 and 1932. In other words, his career is the opposite of commercial. That he's sustained it for going on 20 years-as similar efforts, including Charles Lane's sweet Sidewalk Stories were dismissed as one-shot stunts-seems almost heroic.
Maddin's unlikely odyssey continues with Cowards Bend the Knee, which might be his masterwork. Based equally on Greek tragedies and Maddin's own youth, which unfolded partly in hockey arenas and beauty parlors, it's breezily paced and charming-qualities we've come to expect from Maddin. Paradoxically, though, Cowards Bend the Knee is also Maddin's most gravely serious feature-melancholy, dense and fiercely controlled. Its heft and completeness may surprise even the director's most ardent fans. Written, directed and photographed by Maddin, who conceived it as an installation at the Rotterdam Film Festival, it feels like a signpost work: a summary of Maddin's techniques and obsessions, a whole life and career packed into 78 minutes.
The main character is Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr), forward for the Winnepeg Maroons Senior Hockey Club. His father, Guy Maddin Sr. (Victor Cowie), is the legendary announcer for the Maroons; his Aunt Liliom (Tara Birtwhistle) runs the Black Silhouette, a beauty salon that doubles as an abortion clinic. The latter comes in handy in the first few minutes of Cowards, when Guy's girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) reveals that she's pregnant-and the director's mastery of dream logic ascends to dizzying heights.
Guy takes Veronica to a secret chamber in the Black Silhouette, where Liliom and the Maroons' team doctor, the sinister, chain-smoking Dr. Fusi (Louis Negin), lay the girl out on a table like a corpse being prepped for vivisection. As if this scene's Kabuki acting and Fritz Lang lighting weren't upsetting enough, Maddin throws in additional creepy touches. The room is ringed by porthole-shaped, one-way mirrors that allow inhabitants to secretly spy on the beauty salon outside. The design makes it seem as if staffers and customers are watching abortions as they happen. (The mirrors' spherical shape has an additional, stylistic function: it suggests a silent-film iris.) The coldhearted madam Liliom announces her presence in the operating theater by laying a warm piece of pie on the steel table next to Veronica's head. Liliom's daughter, Meta (Melissa Dionisio), enters the operating room licking sugar from her index finger.
She instantly bewitches Guy, who (true to dream logic) is so smitten with Meta that he abandons Veronica to the abortionists. The scene contains no explicit, obvious violence, but it's just as upsetting, because the images are charged with primal fears: fear of violation, betrayal, abandonment. Throughout the scene, Guy grips Vernoica's hand, but when he sees Meta, he forgets his obligation and lets go. ("The joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new!" proclaims a mocking title card.)
In no time, Meta has drawn the thickheaded Guy into a revenge plot against Liliom, whom Meta believes killed her beautician father with help from one of Guy's teammates. Meta's plan is demented indeed: Dr. Fusi will cut off Guy's hands and replace them with her father's hands (tinted blue from decades of dye work), thus permitting Meta's dad to extract justice from beyond the grave.
The hand-transplant scheme isn't a plot point in search of a context, but the poetic linchpin of Maddin's movie. Hands are the most frequently highlighted body part in Cowards. The director depicts them as more important than eyes, breasts and penises (considering how many of the latter are displayed in this film, that's saying a lot) because they are the appendages by which thought becomes action. Maddin often punctuates a scene by cutting to closeups of hands.
We see hands performing operations and delivering angry blows, hands clenching into angry fists and then releasing, hands trying (and failing) to caress naked breasts, hands cutting women's hair and gripping hockey sticks and holding other hands. (There's even a curiously coy fisting joke, with a punchline Monty Python would have applauded.)
Maddin isn't just establishing a visual pattern: He's literalizing the idea that a single action-perhaps a single gesture-can alter a life. The closeup of Guy letting go of Veronica's hand in the operating room is the first of many pointed gestures in Cowards. Maddin's bleak, hilarious movie highlights men's childish determination to avoid emotional entanglements-and women's corresponding determination to use sex to trap men into doing things women are unable (or unwilling) to do for themselves. Cowards doesn't just reference film noir in its high-contrast, monochrome visuals. It endorses noir's exaggerated, misanthropic view of gender relations, which holds that men are basically brawny, sex-obsessed boys who would cuddle up to a cactus if it were wearing high heels, and women are happy (perhaps biologically wired) to oblige, even though the act of entrapment renders them inhuman.
Maddin doesn't apportion the lion's share of blame to one gender, though. He treats sexual gamesmanship as a circular process, as evidenced by the many circles built into the film's design. An iris encloses a microscope slide full of wriggling spermatozoa, which dissolves to a high overhead shot of a hockey rink overrun by stick-wielding men on skates. A not-quite-sex scene is dominated by bare-breasted Meta's nipples; poor, lustful Guy keeps groping toward these marvelous circles but never quite manages to touch them. It's the sex-fantasy equivalent of a dream where you run and run but never go anywhere.
Like all movies that earn the right to be called art, Cowards succeeds on multiple levels and withstands repeat viewings. It works as a self-contained story, as a tribute to (or extended goof on) silent movies and as a rare work of cinema that uses editing to take us closer to the physical condition of dreaming than we might have thought possible. It's less a by-the-book, three-act story (who wants that?) than a cascade of symbolically loaded images. Some lead us down a linear-narrative footpath; others stutter, recoil and back up, revisiting actions that already occurred and placing them in a new context.
Filmmakers will want to see Cowards twice just to appreciate its cutting. Maddin and his adventurous editor, John Gurdebeke, see past mere continuity and embrace editing's poetic and descriptive potential. The result is a movie that seems truly alive-one that appears to riffle through its own contents, like a dreaming mind considering itself.
Although Maddin obviously adores the past, his movies aren't of the past. He's not just replicating movies in a 1920s or 30s mode; he's not trying to "do" Fritz Lang or F.W. Murnau. Rather, he's trying to extend the direct, dreamlike power of silent cinema into the present. He does this stylistically via modern filmmaking techniques (emphatic jump cuts; wild handheld camerawork; expressive, at times almost Scorsese-like slow motion) and certain thematic elements (including transgressive sex and graphic violence) that could only be alluded to back in the day. And he does it personally-emotionally-by treating the early days of cinema not as an historical period, but as a genre, a "type" of movie that can be recreated, cannibalized, glorified and subverted all at once. His attitude toward films of the 20s and 30s mirrors Tim Burton's approach toward 1930s Universal horror films and Brian De Palma's treatment of Hitchcock and Welles. In every case, the filmmaker treats cinema history as a kind of glorious dress-up chest. The director dons garbs from another era, but the resulting performance is by definition modern-and entirely his own.
PROOF THAT A sharp idea doesn't necessarily yield a good movie, Open Water strands an unhappy vacationing couple (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) in shark-infested water and watches them squabble, panic and try not to end up fish food. The gimmick? Real sharks-sort of. The low-tech, high-concept, P.T. Barnum moxie of 1999's The Blair Witch Project appears to have inspired Open Water.
But where the former only seems artless (while it posed as a documentary, its stripped-down atmospherics and oblique shocks suggested the filmmakers had paid close attention to Roman Polanski and George Romero), director Chris Kentis' debut feature actually is artless-a fictional record of an uninteresting mishap that befell uninteresting people.
In place of the majestic (if rubber) great whites of the "Jaws" series and the super-intelligent (if rubber) tiger sharks of the stupidly enjoyable Deep Blue Sea, Open Water offers mostly bull and reef sharks, which are smaller and obviously not interested in people-flesh. The bleachy DV photography treats the sharks and their nautical kingdom with zero amazement, and much of the time, one is unfortunately aware the lead actors aren't actually swimming in the same water with the beasts-which was supposed to be the point, no? The most potent element in environmental horror films-the awe and fear civilized people feel when confronted with the beauty and ruthlessness of nature, feelings Steven Spielberg articulated brilliantly in the original Jaws-is MIA. These sharks are pests with teeth. o