Love for the Peg

Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is
a hilarious,touching “docu-fantasia”
tribute to his hometown

by MARK SLUTSKY

Guy Maddin is best known for his hallucinatory and often hilarious epics which dip liberally and bizarrely into the genres of early 20th century filmmaking, with touchstones ranging from silent melodramas to the Soviet avant-garde.

He seems to be getting better as a director too. Last year’s Brand Upon the Brain!, shot on Super-8, was a searing, psychosexual saga of lighthouses, lonely islands and teen sleuths, presented, for those lucky enough to see it at the Toronto International Film Festival or in New York, with live foley sound effects and narration.

The latest genre Maddin’s been messing with may be the most unexpected: documentary. While this might seem far from his usual obsessions (and indeed it was commissioned by the History Channel), My Winnipeg is a recognizable Maddin film from the first frame. It’s also brilliant and hallucinatory; the “docu-fantasia,” as he’s called it, is possibly his best film, and certainly one of the best releases of the year so far.

Ostensibly a documentary about his native city, My Winnipeg is that and much more, an examination and excavation of the town that seems to both fascinate and repel him, both real and imaginary.

The “my” of the title is important: the story, as such, is structured around a train journey taken by the young Maddin (played by Darcy Fehr). He’s trying to escape the city, but it keeps drawing him back in, and his struggle to deal with the town, and his concept of home, is the movie’s overriding arc.

Maddin drifts between scraps of the city’s known and hidden history, some of them literally true and others inventive hallucinations—true, maybe, in the sense of Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth.” Frozen horse heads in the river, a male strip club on the top floor of a department store frequented by the city’s elite, Nazi invasions: the literal truth is less important than the picture it paints of the city’s strange, frozen unconscious. It’s also very, very funny.

Interwoven with the strange and bizarre stories of Winnipeg’s past are recreations of Maddin’s own. He rents his childhood home and gets his mother (played by Ann Savage, of the 1945 noir Detour—a true Maddin touch—who even knew she was still alive?) to help re-enact scenes from his childhood, drawing a line between his own history and the city’s.

There’s an anger to this film too. Maddin loves this strange, archaic, sometimes decrepit city, but at the same time, his outrage over its negligence of its own past is palpable.

He makes a case, witty and powerful, for the preservation of a heritage that goes beyond the textbook historical. The marginal, the bizarre, the neglected and the overlooked clearly delight him—and through his lens, us too, and it’s hard to disagree that they shape the city’s identity powerfully.

Any city: I’d love to see My Montreal and My Edmonton and My… I dunno… Pittsburgh. What Maddin transmits with so much humour and power is the strangeness and wonder of any city—you don’t have to be New York or Paris or London to contain a million fascinating secrets and stories.

My Winnipeg opens
this Friday, July 4

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