"Touch-me-not, my Mother's fixed me"
                                                                                             Ludus


According to Guy Maddin, his 1997 film Twilight of the Ice Nymphs "came out of the birth canal stillborn" - and that's kind of how I feel about his latest, My Winnipeg. On paper, it sounds irresistibly tantalising: a "docu-fantasia" love/hate-letter to Maddin's own home town, intertwining its history and geography with his own biography and obsessions. The cherry on the cake: the presence of Detour star Ann Savage playing (a version of) his mother, in what's apparently her first movie for 21 years - and only her second since 1953, when she appeared in Allan Dwan's Woman They Almost Lynched.
   But while it's marvellous to see the indomitable Savage on the big screen again, she isn't really given enough to do. In a movie that often feels like little more than a palimpsest of metafictions, it's bizarre that there's no mention of her previous career: she's presented like any other octogenarian actress - which, as anyone who's seen Detour will testify, is something of a glaringly missed opportunity.
   Presumably Maddin didn't have time to properly work out how to use Savage, as My Winnipeg is such a teeming rag-bag compendium of themes and ideas. It's a black-and-white reverie of recurring images and phrases, a fancifully embroidered psychogeography of "the world's coldest city" that combines the actual, the plausible and the blatantly absurd - shading slyly between each so that we're never entirely sure how to interpret anything that's presented to us. We simply have to go along with the tumbling, freewheeling, self-referential narrative - guided at each step by Maddin's own voice-over - and many critics and audiences have been delighted to do so, resulting in perhaps the most acclaimed and highest-profile feature in the director's two-decade career.
   Watching My Winnipeg, however, I remembered that his Careful was the first film I ever walked out of - at the Tyneside Cinema in 1993 or 1994 (struck me as galumphing, amateurish silliness.) And while this time around I was more patient and indulgent, I can't say that I particularly enjoyed the experience. I struggled to pay attention and avoid nodding off in the early stretches - somewhat ironic, as the film is explicitly presented as a visualisation of Maddin's dreams as the director (played by his regular on-screen surrogate Darcy Fehr) tries to flee Winnipeg aboard a rickety, wobbly old train: images from the film are projected onto and through the train's windows, and the groggy, drowsy Maddin is urged by his own voiceover to stay alert and awake. Indeed, so unengaged did I feel that at more than one juncture I considered retracing my own footsteps from 15 years before and heading for the grittily quotidian delights of Newcastle's Northumberland Street.
   I managed to stay put, but found myself fitfully rewarded. There's something about Maddin's aesthetic that just rubs me up the wrong way: simultaneously ornate and amateurish, archly mannered and clunkingly surreal. I can understand why his singular, uncompromised, rather daffy vision has found so many admirers among the world's cineastes. For me, however, there's something off-puttingly curdled and over-worked about his methods, about how he seems to whimsically dream up any old arbitrary nonsense (usually involving elaborate-but-cheapjack costumed recreations of bizarre historical "incidents") and stick it up on there the screen. Some of it is undeniably striking, provocative, amusing - but too often his scattershot freneticism wildly misses the target and his humour falls flat.
   Maddin's sardonic flippancy, meanwhile, seems decidedly inappropriate when applied to such subject-matter as the teenage suicide of his brother Cameron or, in the wider arena, the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Instead of trying to really come to terms with such major incidents - be they domestic or political - Maddin retreats into a cosy, hermeticism, a solipsistic coyness wrapped up in the crisply diverting monochrome of his imagery. It's a busy, breathless kind of precious conceptual slapstick that in the end reveals surprisingly little about either the film-maker or his supposed subject: rather appropriate, then, that 'Winnipeg' should be Cree for 'muddy water.'

   Though an unsatisfying experience in itself, My Winnipeg did set me up rather nicely for the second leg of an "unofficial" Thursday afternoon double-bill: Tom Kalin's Savage Grace. Both films deal with the tricky relationships between mothers and sons; both are told via wry, calm retrospective narration, spoken by the latter; both navigate several time-frames. But whereas the lo-fi My Winnipeg deliberately never strays from the chilly city-limits, Savage Grace is something of a sleek globetrotter by comparison. The story comprises five chapters - New York, 1946; Paris 1959; Cadaques (Spain) 1967, Mallorca 1968 and London 1972 - tracing key stages in the early life of Tony Baekeland (played by Eddie Redmayne as an adult).
   We see how his birth caused frictions in the tricky marriage of his uber-wealthy parents Brooks (Stephen Dillane) and Barbara (Julianne Moore); how the family was shattered when Brooks ran off with Tony's girlfriend Blanca (Elena Anaya); how in the aftermath of this development Tony and Barbara's relationship became unhealthily close, ultimately leading to dire consequences for all.
   Once the full facts of the Baekeland story are laid bare - by means of quite lengthy (and eyebrow-raising) titles at the end of the film - we realise that Tony is perhaps only slightly more reliable as a narrator than Guy Maddin in My Winnipeg. Everything is filtered through his memory and perspective, and while he outwardly appears like a calm, intelligent and reflective personality, it's soon apparent that he's a mass of neuroses and complexes.
   On one level, Savage Grace - adapted by Howard Rodman from the novel by Natalie Robins and Steven M L Aronson (also told through Tony's "voice") - is a glimpse into the travails of the idle, troubled rich, chronicling a particularly scandalous tale that could in lesser hands have ended up as a tawdry, gossipy yarn. Resisting the urge to follow another Julianne Moore picture, Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, down the path of Douglas Sirk melodrama, Kalin plays things pretty cool and straight - concentrating on providing a stylish but reserved framework (never going overboard on the period design or costume detailings) for the actors to explore their characterisations. 
   And this is essentially a character piece, observational and distanced, giving us the space and time to assess the Baekelands in all their glamour, fickleness and misery. It's in many ways a trickier film to approach than My Winnipeg - much less keen to grab, impress and dazzle - but I found myself responding to its brittle elegance and slightly chilly reticence: a crystalline structure within which the wayward passions of Moore's Barbara can flare in magnified flame.

Neil Young
28.July.08

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MY WINNIPEG
Canada 2007
80m (BBFC timing)
director : Guy Maddin (Brand Upon the Brain!; The Saddest Music in the World; Cowards Bend the Knee, etc)
editor : John Gurdebeke (Brand Upon the Brain!; Lucid; East of Euclid, etc)

SAVAGE GRACE
USA (US/Fr/Spn) 2007
97m (BBFC timing)
director : Tom Kalin (Swoon.)
editor : John F Lyons (debut)

both seen 24.July.08 Newcastle
(The Tyneside Cinema : £5.85 [MW] and £6.85 [SG])