I have to admit, as much as I've loved Guy Maddin's work that I've seen up to now, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so enjoyable from him as this. His work can always be considered, in a sense, Freudian (but beyond the obvious it shows he has a sense of humor about it), but here he mixes in some Jung and Pavlov and creates a mish-mash of androgyny and feverish displacement along with his usual cornucopia of matriphobia, isolation, and anxiety. It also has such immortal lines as "What is a suicide attempt without a wedding?" and "To hide his death from his mother, he replaced the father's body with a hamster and a metronome."
Guy Maddin is certainly an idiosyncratic director, there's no arguing that. What I like is that he is much more than a one-trick pony. There are moments of hysteria in here you cannot help but get sucked into, and somehow even the most outrageous of content makes perfect sense in the worlds and realities he creates. At times you want to draw comparisons between this film and Psycho, Frankenstein, etc., but in the end it's only its own thing, and even as a Maddin film isn't QUITE like his other movies. The voice over is a lot of fun, especially later in the movie when it's used more sparsely, and above all the musical aside just hits the nail on the head--one of those uncanny moments when you didn't even realize the movie was missing something until it happened, and suddenly everything just seems right in the world.
Definitely a movie, if any, to get into this director if you haven't, and if you have you'll certainly not be disappointed.
--PolarisDiB
Guy Maddin is certainly an idiosyncratic director, there's no arguing that. What I like is that he is much more than a one-trick pony. There are moments of hysteria in here you cannot help but get sucked into, and somehow even the most outrageous of content makes perfect sense in the worlds and realities he creates. At times you want to draw comparisons between this film and Psycho, Frankenstein, etc., but in the end it's only its own thing, and even as a Maddin film isn't QUITE like his other movies. The voice over is a lot of fun, especially later in the movie when it's used more sparsely, and above all the musical aside just hits the nail on the head--one of those uncanny moments when you didn't even realize the movie was missing something until it happened, and suddenly everything just seems right in the world.
Definitely a movie, if any, to get into this director if you haven't, and if you have you'll certainly not be disappointed.
--PolarisDiB