My Winnipeg

So why does he say it three times? It's a fair question, I suppose. I find that repetition of words and phrases, especially in voiceover, emphasizes the hypnotic nature of film, itself an almost-repetition of slightly different images passing through a projection gate 24 times a second. Repetition also evokes a quality of timelessness, which is certainly appropriate here. Like much of Maddin's work, My Winnipeg draws heavily on the look and visual grammar of silent film. (One of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it intertitles reads simply: "So sleepy." Another: "Eyes open!") It's unusual in that it claims to be a documentary about the director's childhood home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba. In reality, it's an essay film, its real subject Maddin's memories of his time in Winnipeg, and what he makes of them as an adult. As a narrator, he has an unpracticed but determined voiceover style that deflates pretension by drawing attention to the melodrama inherent in the words. "The dreams are sweet back home, back home," he declares, describing happy visions of his childhood home. "The waking is bitter."

Before long, Maddin has hired actors -- including Ann Savage, star of the low-budget noir classic Detour -- to play his mother and siblings, and has rented out the old family home to recreate his childhood for the camera. Like those thrice-repeated phrases, My Winnipeg is a little bit poetic and a little bit mock-poetic. Fortunately, it's often very funny, as when Maddin describes living atop a hair salon run by his mother, in a room "cloudy, cloudy, cloudy" with hair spray: "The air vent leading upstairs right into my bedroom, bringing me every word of conversation that roiled out of that gynocracy," he recalls. "The smells of female vanity and desperation -- I grew under their influences into what I am."

It's sometimes majestic, as when Maddin imagines the 1919 General Strike in a style suggesting Soviet propaganda, and it's sometimes creepy, as when Maddin has a stern Savage accuse his sister (the actress playing his sister) of sexual indiscretion. It's also majestically creepy -- no more so than in Maddin's recreation of the bizarre aftermath of a 1926 fire at Whittier Park, which, he says, left a group of terrified racehorses to die, frozen, in the water of the Red River, where they would remain for the duration of the winter. ("We grow used to the sadness; simply incorporate it into our days.")

By the time it's over, My Winnipeg has run off on so many tangents its hard to keep track. There's the one about the demolished hockey arena where Maddin says he was born. There's the business about wagering on "man-pageants" held at the Paddle Wheel Nightclub (house specialty: orange Jell-o) and judged by the mayor. ("What does one have to do," the narrator wonders aloud in a tone that mixes disgust with barely disguised prurience, "to be named the Golden Boy?") And there's the mock TV show in which a man stands, every week, on a high window ledge above the streets of Winnipeg, contemplating suicide.

Hometowns can be like that. You love them, you hate them. You cherish some memories, and you resent others. You feel they bring out the worst in you, but you know they've made you who you are. At one point, Maddin asserts the existence of a second, secret network of streets and alleyways that exist, invisible, alongside the real gridwork of Winnipeg. That would be His Winnipeg, a place with real connections to the city, but which exists only in Maddin's head. The film he's made about it may be the year's stand-out achievement in alternate realities -- it's a funny, accomplished look at how the geography of a life influences the topography of a mind. Posted by Bryant Frazer on June 12, 2024 10:59 PM