Essentials: My Winnipeg

Year: 2007
Genre: Experimental
Directed: Guy Maddin
Stars: Ann Savage, Amy Smart, Darcy Fehr, Brendan Cade, Wesley Cade, Lou Profeta, Fred Dunsmore, Kate Yacula, Jacelyn Lobay, Eric Nipp, Jennifer Palichuk, Deborah Carlson
Production: Buffalo Gal Pictures

As a self-described global nomad, I am constantly jealous of those who seem content with living, working and starting a family in one single place. From the outside looking in, going to church amid generations of your kin, sipping a cool beer in one of Main Street's landmark taverns and getting to know your mailman on a first name basis seems beyond quaint. The bonds among friends always appear deeper, the community ties more consequential and the world they created for themselves more meaningful. I often feel that those who live to deride where they come from don't know what their missing, yet I suppose many have their reasons.

My Winnipeg is a pseudo-documentary/essay film/work of elaborate fiction that is arguably the best depiction of a person's complicated relationship with their birthplace ever committed to celluloid. In it director Guy Maddin mythologizes the city he's called home his whole life with surrealist tall-tales of Winnipeg's old hockey arena, the 1919 general strike and a rivalry between two warring taxi cab companies. At the center of it is Maddin (Fehr) who walks like a somnambulist through his snow-covered hamlet, interacting with actors who are hired to reenact half-remembered childhood traumas, most of which concern his shrewish mother (Savage).

Somewhere between a waking dream and a Freudian melodrama, the amateurish reenactments only adds to the atmosphere, which conjures comparisons to early David Lynch. Always the neo-constructionist, Maddin employs a sloe of old-school effects and technical wizardry that enhances the experience. It has been said that Maddin's films always have the feeling of seeing pre-code talkies from another, warped dimension. A dimension where people of the thirties would accept fluid sexuality, incest and gore in their films. Granted while My Winnipeg sacrifices the gleefully salacious themes of Careful (1992) and the grotesqueness of Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) the film stands as the director's most personal work. The same themes do remain but only on the fringes, subtlety weaved into a complex tapestry of nostalgia and surreal flights of fancy.

Those seeing My Winnipeg for the first time may catch themselves wondering if the myriad of tall-tales are true. So many claims skate the edge between amusing peculiarity and improbable absurdity that it's hard to ferret out what's real and what's a product of docu-fantasia. While I can sympathize, asking such questions is comparable to asking how many angels you can fit on a match head. It's better to let the film wash over you and be regaled by stories of frozen horse heads, treasure hunts, aboriginal origin stories and other "facts" about the heart of the heart of the continent. That and be taken in by the crisp black and white cinematography that only adds to the city's macabre charm.

Maddin states via narration that he must escape Winnipeg. "I must leave it now, but how to escape one's city?" Many people ask themselves that same question before taking that fateful step to (hopefully) greener pastures and opportunity aplenty. Even if you're the type of person who yearns to leave their small town, it seems, at least according to director Guy Maddin, that you can't really escape the smothering embrace of a world exaggerated in your own mind. Whether all is true or none of it is, My Winnipeg still remains an exemplary portrait of the Canadian "The Gateway to the West".

Final Grade: A