Director: Guy Maddin
Year Released: 2006
Rating: 1.0
Another stroboscopic novelty from Maddin, this time about a man named Guy Maddin, his return to his childhood abode (a lighthouse) and the reawakening of youthful traumas. Unlike the generally humorous Cowards Bend the Knee, this one genuinely feels like Maddin rehashing himself, throwing everything into the stew in terms of technique (flash cuts, multiple cameras, expressive lighting) and taboo (cross-dressing, incest) and genre (sci-fi/horror, drama, comedy) but completely exhausting itself: it tries to be everything and ends up as nothing. Giving his lead character his own name suggests a degree of autobiography, but that's misleading - this is about Maddin's experience as a voyeur and his studied appropriation of silent cinema's language: it is movie making for the sake of movie making. Seeing this as a live performance (instead of on DVD) might have raised the rating - the showing was originally accompanied by a narrator and live sound effects, rendering it a kind of experimental theater (and doubling the novelty factor).
