My Winnipeg

Written by Guy Maddin and George Toles
Directed by Guy Maddin
Canada; 2007


Winnipeg's night skyline is framed by the window of Mr. Maddin's (played by an actor but actually narrated by the filmmaker himself this time) sleeper car on a passenger train on an endless loop around the city, like a thought bubble above his restless noggin. You sure can't take the city out of the boy, but apparently you can't quite take the boy out of the city, either. The loop is something of a fitting metaphor for the paradox of light rail in North America, where the Canadian public transit ridership is two to three times what it is in comparable American cities, but the public spending on infrastructure and upkeep in Canada is only about half that of its southern neighbor. That's a hard, sourced fact, something Mr. Maddin certainly won't give you. Disproving truth, or what cinema conventions would usually tell us is true, is basically his m.o., and in this newest film he's taken it to the next level, telling flat out lies about his hometown and its history. This self-narrated hodgepodge of experimental docu-fantasia (that's the term he uses) describes what we Americans would recognize as the de-industrialized capital of a midwestern swing state (do they have those in Canada?). The city has fared well, it seems, through a mad century of capitalization and subsequent demolition at the hands of those storybook robber barons, the department store speculators.

Those robber barons. Robber barons that have subsequently demolished the city. This narrated track (I'm so upset I missed the live narration performed only once at Tribeca this year, by the way. I was probably at that stupid Pangea Day thing. Doesn't anyone else see this crap as globalization? Anyway...) this narrated track is written with such repetitive eloquence. The phrases and rephrases are almost like chapter headings. At this point in Guy Maddin's career, though, his stylistic moves are no longer groundbreaking, and really only serve as branding while we experience the unique elements of each piece. It is exactly this fact that allows My Winnipeg to work so nicely as an essay, for one, because it's not necessarily about putting together a cohesive film experience, but more about reconciling a specific set of ideas while the hodgepodge illustrates. This is a technique perfected from the inside out by Su Friedrich in 1990's Sink or Swim, a film in which Freudian parent-child relationships, personal insecurities, and the idea of the innocent persona in the big bad world are all intellectual and emotional issues (as in Maddin's best work, Careful, The Heart of the World, My Father is 100 Years Old), rather than, however funny, mere jokes (as in his less successful Cowards Bend the Knee, and Brand Upon the Brain!). There are extremely funny moments here, especially during the NHL sequences and the domestic reenactments, which are both somehow bizarre and familiar at the same time, recalling the very best David Lynch moments, or perhaps a Kurt Vonnegut description of a dying family in a dying city. This is another move in the right direction for Maddin, and if his methods—once so mind-blowing but now old hat—can keep pace with his mad rush of ideas, than we can expect the delights to continue.