The Twentieth Century (2019)

 

Director: Matthew Rankin

Screenplay: Matthew Rankin

Cast: Dan Beirne as Mackenzie King; Sarianne Cormier as Nurse Lapointe; Catherine St-Laurent as Ruby Eliott; Mikhaïl Ahooja as Bert Harper; Brent Skagford as Arthur Meighen; Seán Cullen as Lord Muto; Louis Negin as Mother; Kee Chan as Dr. Milton Wakefield; Trevor Anderson as Mr. Justice Richardson; Emmanuel Schwartz as Lady Violet; Richard Jutrasas Father; Satine Scarlett Montaz as Little Charlotte

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Canada is just one failed orgasm after another...

The tale of Mackenzie King - the 10th Prime Minister of Canada - has to be pointed out ahead of time to been authentic. King was a real Prime Minister of Canada. Whilst this film comes with aspects clearly lost to me originally on the first viewing, being neither Canadian nor as clear on the history of these "disappointed" people as their land is called in this world of the film, this is still set in real history if imagined aesthetically between Guy Maddin, an Myst-like nineties PC game, Canada if interpreted by Walter Ruttmann experimental films about shape and form, and least one obscure British game show as I will get into later. Inspired by King's diaries, Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin on his theatrical length debut threw down a gauntlet for himself, which I feel he succeeded in, to adapt them into an anxious fever dream.

You can spot he grew up with Maddin, his fellow Canadian, but far from redundant to replicate Maddin's style of the Careful (1992) era with his own flourishes, Rankin's work is beautiful to witness and as it goes on, including moody synthwave from his composers Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux and Peter Venne in the climax, Rankin comes to this with his own ideas. Building from the template of his forefather, Rankin comes with his own work, and also has Louis Negin of Maddin's The Forbidden Room (2015), as King's domineering mother, so the Maddin circle embraces -- as one of their own.

Thankfully like Maddin, Rankin decided to embrace the forefather's same eccentricities like maple walnut ice cream and zoos to pet pelicans, all in the first lines of dialogue as King befriends a young girl with tuberculosis in a scene which is both sentimental but incredibly dark humoured. I would argue Canadian cinema, when it is allowed, can be truly peculiar to rival their neighbours south, which is significant to bring up with The Twentieth Century. Set in around 1899, when the second Boer War transpires and exists in the film, a war Canada was involved with as part of the British Empire against two independent states of Dutch speaking rebels in the southern African lands, this film is distressed throughout with national heritage and what it means to be decent and Canadian. It is material which might seem odd to look at, of the Victorian era, when Canada has moved on passed the twentieth century with its own new identities and clichés, such as their decentness, but here is of angst, having to look good as a person especially in politics, and absolutely no sexual fetishes like huffing shoes as King is immediately established to have early in this film.  

King is determined to be his namesake, or at least the new Prime Minister of Canada, his father a henpecked man shut out from his wife's sanctum, said mother having controlled King so long even dreams of hers are prophecies. To become Prime Minister is itself a challenge, of such elaborate challenges such as ribbon cutting, leg wrestling, urinating one's name in perfect font on a urinal, and baby seal clubbing as a bloody Whack-a-Mole game where they are thankfully depicted with puppets. The point of the film Rankin admits was that he wanted to implode the biopic genre, believing it inherently fictional¹, which I absolutely admire as someone who finds the biopic one of the most unrewarding film genres for me personally to ever exist. Exceptions that have won me really show where I stand, when Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) is considered a high bar. This is not a weird film to bring up, as that film as an actual biopic was an aesthetically dense and delirious work, involving adapting the novels of Yukio Mishima in little narratives, and being as dense in terms of psychosexual content in a more serious tone when dealing with Mishima's blend of nationalism, homosexuality, and obsession with physical beauty (bodybuilding to Saint Sebastian, the saint killed tied to a tree with arrows shot at him) against his fear and fixation with death. Whilst I do not know whether King liked to masturbate sniffing shoes, or had a cactus given to him by the sinister Dr. Milton Wakefield (Kee Chan) that ejaculates when he slips off the trail of being a respectable Canadian, but against even such broad humoured perversity, that this deals with the anxieties of King by way of these delirious tangents is not that blasphemous when seen as metaphors.   

Certainly when you get to the narrative, it is a conflict between the militaristic might of the real ruler of Canada, Governor-General Lord Muto (Seán Cullen), and a French-Canadian politician Joseph Israël Tarte who leads for peace into the new century, including a greater independence for French Canada. Tarte, as played by actress Annie St-Pierre, was a real politician of liberal leanings, including opposition to Canada's involvement in the second Boer War, seen in this film as propaganda where the Boers are merely depicted as baby killing half-elephant people by Muto, so The Twentieth Century for all its sick humour and perverseness is dealing with real history, causing it to distort to peck at the truths and madness of it. King is ultimately the spineless protagonist forced to become the figure between both political sides, a fascinating figure to have as a central character. It is also befitting, was probably the truth of the real King, alongside accusations of corruption², fitting as more truthful than a biopic which would have to remove real context to be narrative driven. One detail that would have been fascinating to see, though comes later in his life, and you would also see in a Guy Maddin film was his secret fascinating with spiritualism and mediums to contact the dead. He also unfortunately developed an idolised, frankly obsessive, high viewpoint of Adolf Hitler, viewing him as a mystical figure of saintliness³ which adds a dark coda to the fictionalised version here, an apt one in regards to the malleability and obsession with destiny his fictional counterpart here has.

I once rolled my eyes at "a lament for 21st century nihilism", from the introduction Matthew Rankin also wrote for the 2021 MUBI introduction¹, but that was only because it might have presumed a worldview, as many have in the 21st century, that nothing matters truly after what the 20th century led to. But here seeing this film, not only is there the paradox that for all my anti-nihilism I have a very sick sense of humour, so I found so much of Rankin's film hilarious as with Guy Maddin's work, but that that phrase from the introduction takes on different perspective for me. That here, into this world's new century, there is passion to be had, no numbness, only a fin de siecle frenzy between two sides, love or hate, with the putz in the middle still a sympathetic figure we admire. One who is torn as much in love, between the ideal proclaimed to him, Muto's daughter Ruby Eliott (Catherine St-Laurent), the blonde haired soldier and perfect angelic figure, and French-Canadian Nurse Lapointe (Sarianne Cormier), a wholesome and sweet figure actually in love with King originally too.

It does seem poignant, even in this openly silly film where King's shoe huffing masturbation obsession becomes a soul destroying when he loses the presidency competition, that Rankin viewed the real King as a man who "gingerly walked a very cautious line right down the middle"¹, political centrism compelling in a time of fanatical binaries in modern politics. It could be seen as compromising at the worse as what King did in real life, "sitting on the fence" as we call it in Britain, but even this film touches on something poignant in this aspect, passion still in King to want to help people here even as a broad caricature actor Dan Beirne brings to like very well. That the real man is far more complicated and problematic, such as his apparent admiration for Hitler, does not ruin this but adds so much to the film's tone intertextually.

This is externalised when King is caught between the real power of Muto, a man who brainwashes Canada with true Canadianess and a war with a Germanic half-elephant half-human group the Boers are turned into, and Tarte, demanding individuality, a character alongside being one of the many gender reversing casting choices who comes off in contest like a communist freethinker in how conservative Muto hates him. Literally born from the yoke of tenderness, i.e. from an actual human sized egg, Tarte here is clearly in mind to modern day liberal thinkers, but in context sitting a time when Karl Marx was on ideal and not sullied by the Soviet Union's eventual history. So many contexts are lost not being born Canadian myself, but dealing with "the vivifying froth of man", Rankin explicitly has King an easily manipulated figure stuck between both sides. Redemption is offered by Lapointe as a true love, but he is fixated on Ruby as the idealised image of Canadianess. King is noble if a little dumb in himself, offering a ribbon for his campaign to the young girl dying of tuberculosis, but wide eyed and trying. His chance at redemption, to walk between the sides, is to be found in an ice maze, if evoking the obscure ITV show Ice Warriors (1998), an ice skating themed Gladiator show, if only you had to fight Canadian presidency by raising your sides flag in a maze and with the risk of unexpected Narwhale impalement involved. 

Rankin also decided to push the artistry of his film to a wonderful extreme, showing larger budgeted films off badly by having this unique world onscreen. Not attempting to be period accurate at all, his Maddin influence is matched by others too, a dash of neo-eighties aesthetic (the colours and synthwave score), and specifically Karen Zeman, the Czeck animator/filmmaker who used two dimensional paper craft and sets with real actors, here in The Twentieth Century an almost abstract world. Locations like Winnipeg look like realms on an open world map for old videogames where you would have to load screens to solve puzzles, and Ruttmann, the Germany cinematographer and avant-garde filmmaker, is very notable to bring up in how alongside the paper craft of Zeman, the minimalism where the land is depicted in paths and esoteric shapes evokes watching the likes of Lichtspiel: Opus I (1921) if actors were abruptly planted into the middle of them, let along something obvious influences like German Expressionist cinema and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

The sets' streamlined, almost abstract natures are contrasted by the craft, barring Winnipeg, which is depicted as a hellhole of impoliteness, swearing and a shoe fetish related fantasy club known as The Heel. Alongside men playing women, women playing men, you have so many idiosyncratic figures onscreen who stick out. The likes of Dr. Wakefield, the head of a psychological asylum to prevent crimes against national dignity with tools like an alarm chastity belt for men that is set off by erections; Mr Schultz the money lender with a cactus hand, with a willingness to even kill puppet parrots named Giggles as a warning for unpaid loans; or even the aforementioned cactus Wakefield provides to King, which does inde3ed explodes in ejaculation during King's depression based shoe fetish and even rots in a truly grotesque, and frankly disgusting way, when a mere kink unfortunately becomes a destructive vice, foul yellowed semen stand-in everywhere as a result. It is over-the-top but, wanting to depict a person's psycho dramatic anxieties from diary sources, the extremity itself does feel aptly a fever dream.

The Twentieth Century is exceptional in context, a great debut for a director to have begun with, but with mind that there were short films which honed his style before, it feels like a project visibly planned out as carefully as possible alongside allowing his imagination to gallop. It can even be argued, whilst not a dismissal of Guy Maddin at all, it feels more confident and precise in style and ideas than his idol's own debut Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), which should be held as a real compliment. Definitely the levels to the film, beyond its twisted humour, in distorting history means this has a weight that, if more people can see the film, would raise it as one of the more rewarding films from the 2010s.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Eccentric/Expressionist/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

 

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1) The MUBI introduction can be read HERE.

2) Such as the Beauharnois Scandal, when Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power Co were discovered having made substantial contributions to the Liberal Party of Canada.

3) Examples of this can be read of HERE.