Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Gretchen Krich as Mother; Cathleen O'Malley as Young Mother; Susan Corzatte as Old Mother; Sullivan Brown as Young Guy Maddin; Erik Steffen Maahs as Older Guy Maddin; Maya Lawson as Sis; Jake Morgan-Scharhon as Chance Hale/Wendy Hale; Todd Moore as Father; Clayton Corzatte as Old Father; Andrew Loviska as Savage Tom; Kellan Larson as Neddie

An Abstract Candidate

 

A womb opening up like a window!

Arguably this, a remembrance in twelve chapters, was a holy grail to finally reach for me, able to finally witness what was originally a Guy Maddin production screened with on stage narrators and live to the images on the silver screen, and became available in its Criterion Collection release form with numerous narrators to choose from. The opening already sets up what to expect by linking the erotic to stabbing knives and violence, and you can tell this is a Guy Maddin film eventually, if it did not click before, when an older mother figure is chewing the side off a boy in the finale. This is notwithstanding his trademark of naming leads after himself, this Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs in the bookends, Sullivan Brown through his childhood memories) with his own neurosis to unpack as he returns to the family lighthouse after thirty years. He returns to Black Notch to repaint to the home for his ailing mother, only for “spurts of memories” to return to Guy of his childhood, one which is a calamity of neurosis to unpick for countless reasons.

At a lighthouse which was an orphanage and Dad was a scientist always working, when this childhood involves the orphan boys’ leader Savage Tom conducting black masses you see how Guy's life was one full of said neurosis, especially as there is a mother complex from one who is overprotective, traumatizing her children with guilt, threatening to sell the lighthouse to keep Guy in line, and badgers her eldest daughter for being an older sister, interesting in the opposite sex and secretly smoking. It is clear Guy had enough neurosis to unpack already, but as with other Maddin films, this cannot be enough, as it turns out however his parents are up to no good experiments using the orphans, which brings Wendy Hale (Jake Morgan-Scharhon), the celebrity sister of a brother-and-sister team of teen detectives to the island to investigate this.

To those with no prior knowledge on Guy Maddin, his career has taken various influences from older cinema technique, but a key period post The Heart of the World (2000), a short which won him acclaim, was silent cinema in its various guises, from Soviet montage to Gothic German Expressionism. His career is more diverse than this, and he still can have sound here, but his fascination at this point with monochrome films, with using visuals and intertitles for emphasis, and creating intertitles you would never get in older films from the twenties, was his own distinct take on them. With the addition of the narrator, who (depending on what version you watch) varies from Isabelle Rossellini to even Crispin Glover, the tapestry of his filmmaking style is just as eclectic as the strange melodramas he makes, here the corrupt lighthouse orphanage, and the mother and father’s obsession with collecting “nectar” even from their own children, rivaled by the amount of queer and heterosexual sexual tension in the midst of this. This is especially as Wendy Hale decides to pose as her own brother to investigate this case, falling in love with Guy’s older sister (Maya Lawson) after a secret game of spin the bottle, and Guy having a crush with Wendy Hale in her normal clothes which will become complicated in terms of his and others’ sexuality.

As with all Guy Maddin films, this is not the end of this. The unconventional rituals are here, with the "kissing gloves" that allow one's wearer to kiss and touch someone, alongside the fact that the nectar conspiracy involves the mother's desire to use it to become young again, even down to a baby, with further contentious psychosexual content involved. Sexual anxiety is rife, and as with other Guy Maddin films, this is within its own distinct logic and tone. The style is entirely of his own and, using the silent cinema techniques to add an energy to the proceedings one minute, using it to add to the ghosts literally haunting the lighthouse in the present the next, Brand Upon the Brain shows his skill at this point, a style he would eventually move from into new ones with digital technology into the 2010s. Again, to see a key piece of his cinema, missing for me, was rewarded with a film that is as deliciously weird and yet still imaginative as this.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Weird

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