Dir. Guy
Maddin
Screenplay:
Guy Maddin
Cast:
Darcy Fehr as Guy Maddin; Melissa
Dionisio as Meta; Amy Stewart as Veronica; Tara Birtwhistle as Liliom; Louis
Negin as Dr. Fusi; Mike Bell as Mo Mott; David Stuart Evans as Shaky; Henry
Mogatas as Chas; Victor Cowie as Maddin Sr.
An
Abstract Candidate Re-Evaluation
Guy
Maddin is an experimental director yet he is not stereotypically
avant-garde, his trademark style completely linkable to past aesthetics -
silent film aesthetics with intertitles jostled against dialogue films,
post-CGI affects, or between specific colour styles to monochrome. Varying per
film, they are still his own. Guy Maddin
can proudly claim every film of his is unique and distinct to the others, which
even applies to his short film making, which few directors can do. Originally
designed as an installation piece made more candid as a peepshow exhibition, separated
into chapters as sixty plus minute epic altogether, Coward Bend the Knees even for Guy
Maddin is his most overtly lewd, sexual and at times perverse whilst Maddin drags Maddin through the dirt.
Literally, as Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr), an ice hockey player, is
introduced, at a back alley abortion clinic in the back of a hairdresser's
which is also a bordello, leaving his girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) to die of an illegal abortion to lust after Meta (Melissa Dionisio). All is this is whilst
in mid-operation, as he eyes the daughter of Liliom (Tara Birtwhistle), owner of a hair dressers. Meta wants revenge on
her mother and her younger lover Shaky (David
Stuart Evans), the captain of the ice hockey team, for murdering her
father, loving to her and his hands blue because of the dyes used in his
hairdressing work. Very clearly fixated on him to the point it is uncomfortably
sexual, Meta plans to have her late father's persevered hands grafted onto
Maddin, only for Dr. Fusi (Maddin
regular Louis Negin) to throw them in
the bin and paint Maddin's hands blues to pretend it was completed. I would not
be surprised if Guy Maddin was
evoking films like The Hands of Orlac (1924),
the Austrian silent film great Conrad
Veidt, as a pianist whose hands are destroyed in a train accident, is
horrified to learn he may have had the hands of a murderer surgically attached
to him, Maddin the director, having Maddin
the star as a figure tempted by Meta to murder her mother and Shaky with the
promise of her body, his hands seemingly possessed by the ghost of her father
despite being his original ones painted blue.
And yet he ends up with Liliom, and Veronica,
despite dying, comes back as a ghost/doppelganger working in the hairdressers
and is having a relationship with Maddin Sr. (Victor Cowie), Guy's father. Somehow, in only sixty minutes, this
perverse blackly humoured work juggles between intentionally falling off the
rails and being tied up in a cohesive structure. Maddin deliberately goes against the notion that any event has to
be the same as the rest of a story's structure, letting the events dictate the
structure instead, including those that go into the completely absurd and goes
against conventional rationalisation. For those not used to his cinema, this
content exists in its own logic, that of lurid and unpredictable cinema from a
yesteryear, a yesteryear that does not exist and comes from its own plane of
reality. For those used to Maddin
like myself, Cowards Bend the Knees
is, even for a director who tackled taboos from the beginning, his most overtly
lurid film.
Details like the onscreen male full
frontal nudity in the post-hockey game showers, to Melissa Dionisio's nude scenes, to the set-up being that the
narrative is taking place in semen being scrutinised under a microscope, Maddin
is not kidding himself in the explicitness here. Gender balancing is found the
poking of the male body as well as the female, which actually does happen when
a large pare of buttocks is confused for a doorbell, scrutinising masculinity
even to the point of a large close-up of Maddin Sr's penis as he used a urinal
being witnessed when someone has the unfortunate position of trying to use the
one just by him with no hands. Even the weird kinks the director-writer is
known for feel more perverse here, like Maddin Sr. having, whilst commentating
on hockey games, a breast carved from ice he fondles mid-match even with
Vernonica's double on his arm. Even without the sexual edge, Cowards Bend the Knees befittingly is not
your ordinary murder revenge story, particularly when it also has an ice hockey
museum in the lofts of the ice rink, full of wax mannequins of dead hockey
players who may not actually be dead, a clash with the elite Soviet ice hockey
team of concern, out-of-left-field sexual practices not even seen in some porn,
and blue filter, in a black and white film, to show the majesty of blue hands.
It feels like Maddin, to the point he
puts himself under the guillotine, fully investing in emasculating the male gender
in its worse. A trademark I have seen in his films has been how much his work
has been about men and their sexual libidos for all the worst aspects,
emasculating them in the process.
Guy
Maddin is a director to draw on obsessions and material almost dreamt of
and does not soften them to seem conventionally rational to the viewer. To
purposely undercut narrative conventions with non-sequiturs, absurdity, and
bookend his works in narratives-within-narratives, here it is more intimate as,
if My Winnipeg (2007) is entirely
accurate in telling his own biography, Maddin grew up living above a
hairdressers, whilst having both ice hockey part of his blood and a father who
ran their team in Winnipeg. His work is
also an ode to cinema, not only to the film making techniques of the past,
arcane rather than nostalgia, contacting once dead cinematic practices, but
also an ode to the lack of pristine gloss. The concept of viewing films scratched
up and with jittering frames is something we find sad to witness, desiring
these films preserved, but there is something irresistible to seeing them with
scratches too, textures that makes them unique compared to other films. In Cowards Bend The Knees, the images are
also shown through a circle surrounded by complete black, of its peepshow
origins and very old silent films, made to look like a blurred and damaged film
print Maddin discovered in a basement
of a Canadian home, sordid hyper stylised thrills that would have gotten the
scissors on it by censors back in granddad's day. Frames moves and the actors are
at points distorted into figures of pure grain as they are clear and beautiful
in portraying these exaggerated archetypes. Entirely silent, with intertitles,
it charges ahead with its content in quick, sharply edited images clearly
learnt from Soviet propaganda cinema. The content itself manages to be shocking
and surprising, yet this style compiles it all together into one cohesive
whole. He manages to depict consensual
fisting just in Soviet montage, whilst being entirely unsubtle about it in a
way evoking Sergei Eisenstein, a man
who, alongside his genius was also very sexual open, someone who would have
probably approved the scene with delight.
What does it say as well about the
director when he names his less-than-great protagonist after himself? It may be
fantastical in tone, but the ecstatic truth, to quote Werner Herzog, is that in doing so, Maddin admits with Maddin the character - spineless, a coward, a
killer - failings he might have encountered in himself or other men subconsciously
shown through the scenarios shown onscreen, exaggerated to an extreme. Then
there are the autobiographical aspects. Maddin's
mother in the role of Meta's blind grandmother, that he grew up with ice
hockey, his father coaching an actual hockey team, as well as hairdressing being
part of a family business. He would later go on to make the poignant and funny My Winnipeg which directly examined his
titular Canadian homeland and his life, but in placing his own memories within
content like this with its killer hands, and Elektra based influences and
perversions, it is far from undermining it but using the absurd and perverse
content to amplify and examine the effect these reminiscences. By way of dreams
and the logic of a b-movie cum German Expressionist influence horror movies,
what is enjoyable as a spectacle by itself means more when he is bringing a
subconscious confession to this film, even through psychotronic, erotic murder
melodrama and literary meanings. It also makes this a far better cult film than
many others for providing more in its sixty minutes than most films. That the
film does not end happily, yet feels perversely charming for the deaths,
disappointments and someone taking their place in the wax mannequin hall of
fame feels apt.
Abstract
Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eerie/Perverse/Weird
Abstract
Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High
No comments:
Post a Comment