My Winnipeg (Canada, 2007)

Imagine you’re on a train, and the prescription medication you’re on is playing hell with your sleep patterns so you’re in a weird and hazy state and keep falling into these micronaps but your brain wrenches you out of it so you can’t quite sleep and on the train with you is a guy from Winnipeg and he tells you stories about himself and about Winnipeg but you think some of them got mixed up with your dreams or maybe he was talking about his dreams about Winnipeg and you’re not sure about it and maybe you’re not even awake right now.
My Winnipeg is like that.
Guy Maddin’s weird-ass “docu-fantasia” was made for the Documentary Channel and you have to hope they knew what they were getting into. Its mostly about Guy Maddin trying to escape the gravitational pull of his mother, or is it the supernatural magnetism of the bison and the hidden river forks underneath the real river forks? Anyway he’s on a train trying to escape again and telling stories about his past, telling stories about his mother, telling stories about Winnipeg. And it gets pretty bizarre.
Maddin’s Winnipeg is an absurdly fanciful creation, where grains of truth (old footage shows them off) are spun into outlandish and wild stories that still somehow manage to keep one foot in the realm of plausibility. Certainly I want them to be true, because why not? There’s a buffalo-haunted seance-ballet, a secret team of ancient ice hockey stars scuffling in the depths of a building as it is being demolished, and lots of sleepwalking. There are feverish recreations of incidents in Maddin’s childhood, with his mother playing herself surrounded by actors taking the parts of Maddin’s siblings, except it isn’t really his mother playing herself its another actress.
If there is one genuine strand to the picture its the frustration Maddin feels at the demolition of several storied old buildings in Winnipeg; here the claustrophobic black-and-white breaks out into bursts of colour only to watch as these grand old edifices are torn down and replaced by heartless committee-built modernity.
I enjoyed this film a great deal. It took me a while to warm up to it – the over-the-top pretension took a while to wind around itself enough to convince me this wasn’t a failed experiment – but when it got me, it got me good. I don’t think I can recommend this one generally, but if you think you might dig it – yeah, you probably will.