My Winnipeg (2007)

Winnipeg is the capital and largest city in Manitoba. Occasionally, you'll hear a somewhat dry fact tossed out from Guy Maddin's narrative in his new "docu-fantasia" film, My Winnipeg, but mostly, you'll be taken into the depths of Maddin's subjective perspective of the city he's inhabited for the duration of his life. Maddin spews out questions like "How to find one's way out?" that juxtapose scenes of nostalgia. Old Winnipeggers dance, skate, and work us into screeching train whistles and foggy rails.

Passed-out train passengers take us in what feels like present day, though the aesthetic feels of something shot sixty years ago. The entire film is in black-and-white and grainy. Sleeping passengers and Maddin's repetitive chants of "The Red, the Forks, the lap" trance you into a sort of sleep/wake moment. Suitable for a city that Maddin claims has ten times the sleep walking rate than anywhere else in the world. Fact or fiction? one can't be sure, but it is convincing enough on the screen. Rich blacks, and greys contrasted by the white landscape result in a soft early morning, wintry light.

Then we are introduced to Mother (Ann Savage.) Several reenactments of Maddin's childhood memories- or character interpretations of various family members take place. "Was it the boy on the track or the man with the tire iron?" asks Mother when her daughter, Janet, comes home with fur and blood on the bumper of her car. "There are no such things as accidents," claims Mother just before accusing her daughter of sleeping with the boy on the track or the man with the tire iron. Traumatic? Not as traumatic as it could be or one would like it to be.

Maddin's meshing of histories, of reality and perspective, though interesting seems feigned at moments. His personal history isn't ever truly confessed in the sense of full realization of why he's bothered to film dramatized versions of stuff we aren't really sure took place or not. Do we care? Enough to be amused at Mayor Cornish wearing a Santa beard and admiring muscular, half-nude men, and certainly enough to watch the entirety of the 80 minute feature. Enough to not enjoy the he claim that everyone in the film is a hired actor, except for his Mother, but maybe not enough to feel like something of true value came out of this work except for a decent, finished feature.

The end seems just as the beginning did in terms of character. The city has changed, naturally, an evolution of architecture, and commerce distracted by unwise demolition does occur over a period of nearly a century. But the Winnipeggers seem as they did in the beginning, to continue on half-sleeping through life as Maddin asks "Who's alive? Who's alive?"