Director Guy Maddin Contemplates His Canadian Hometown in Dreamlike ‘My Winnipeg’

Rating: 4.5/5.0

CHICAGO – The distinct, gauzy style of director Guy Maddin has created unique cinematic prisms to look through including his depression-era meditation in “The Saddest Music in the World”.

In his latest film, which is a documentary of sorts, Maddin explores his own life through his hometown of Winnipeg in western Canada. He contemplates the far-off sense of leaving the city and seeks a kind of renewal through an anti-nostalgic look back at it.

Kate Yacula as Citizen Girl in Guy Maddin’s “My Winnipeg”. Photo credit: Jody Shapiro, copyright Everyday Pictures

Guy Maddin was born in Winnipeg in 1956. He speaks of his early life there while living in a ramshackle home that contained his mother and aunt’s beauty parlor.

His development is distilled through the sights, sounds and smells of the salon along with the memories of the icons serving Winnipeg.

The giant downtown department store, the hockey arena where his father worked and a strange amusement park called Happyland all figure into his conscious reminiscence. The loss of this signals both the end of the era and his youth.

To take the “My Winnipeg” film experiment in looking back to another level, Maddin rents the beauty parlor house where he once lived and hires actors to play his brothers, sister and mother from 1963.

He then recreates specific and sometimes uncomfortable moments from his family history and watches them again in the sense of a voyeur traveling through time. His Winnipeg always remains in the center of it all.

Ann Savage as Mother and Darcy Fehr as Ledge Man in “My Winnipeg,” which is directed by Guy Maddin. Photo credit: Jody Shapiro, copyright Everyday Pictures

This is an achingly beautiful film that’s full of black-and-white images working as both stark reality and soft-focus dreams.

The historical footage from the actual Winnipeg is quite compelling as if all images of the past can be neatly summed up through chamber-of-commerce promotions.

The icons of his hometown produce a more wistful remembrance. The old and traditional hockey stadium (Winnipeg Arena) becomes an elegy for his dead father.

Maddin’s dad worked as a statistician for the various hockey events that took place in the arena.

Through Maddin’s lens, old hockey players play a final time in the crumbling edifice. The final tear down of the building represents a strong death of those impressions. The recreation of his family’s historical events, though, is desperately funny.

RELATED IMAGE GALLERY View our full, high-resolution “My Winnipeg” image gallery. RELATED READING Read more film reviews from critic Patrick McDonald.

The actress playing his mother (Ann Savage) overplays all the rather normal situations. An incident with Maddin’s sister where she runs over a deer with the family car becomes an odd morality play when filtered through Savage and the other actress attempting staged line readings about it.

The film overall plays like a feverish dream.

The overlapping images have the flow of subconsciousness that can’t be controlled or censored and unspool almost organically. This provides a narrative regarding a Winnipeg that is gone through time, space and old buildings but still exists as exposed through the memory and expression of Guy Maddin.

By PATRICK McDONALD Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com