Careful

 

Director Guy Maddin 

CAREFUL                 A-                                                                                                        Canada  (100 mi)  1992  d: Guy Maddin

Watching Careful is like observing a dream from an ancient time.  A mash-up of mysteries and manners.  Guy Maddin, I believe, is one of the masters who is dissatisfied with today’s film landscape.  He likes to return to cinematic treasure chests and speculate on their various evolutionary paths.  Careful is a powerful declaration of resistance.                                           —Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Deliriously demented, certainly not like anything else you’ve ever seen, co-written with George Toles, a mentor and frequent collaborator, professor of film studies and drama at the University of Manitoba, yet filmed, directed, and edited by Maddin, who is also the production designer and sound editor, so this film has his imprint all over it.  Exploring, among other things, incest and the Oedipal complex, Maddin creates a playful subversion of genres, where he seems to be having fun with Freudian psychoanalytic theories, using color filters, hand-tinted color gels, sepia tints, and painted backdrops to explore anxieties and deep-seated repression.  His first color feature and most dialogue-heavy effort to date, the filmmaker’s cinematic obsessions deliberately resemble the look of silent films, complete with foggy lenses, jumpy editing, inconsistent film-speeds, missing frames, extreme camera angles, absurdly melodramatic dialogue, old costumes, bad film exposures, tinted monochrome, saturated color, and scratchy musical recordings, with a specifically composed musical score by John McCulloch.  You’d think you walked into a cinema of the 20’s and 30’s, when the silent era reigned supreme, as even after the introduction of talking pictures, the style was essentially the same.  For a movie adapting previous genres into a modern era film, this is shockingly original, absurdly funny, and a true work of art, a cinema of excess, inhabiting a world where hysteria and parody co-exist, remaining exhaustingly complex, leaving the impression of an alternate world strangely distanced from our own, where watching it can be a chore, as the thoroughly unsympathetic characters aren’t exactly developed into anything relatable or understandable, instead they feel more like stock storybook figures, caricatures even, like out of a children’s fairy tale.  With its preoccupation with shame and desire through a complicated story of three families caught up in incestuous relationships, this is all part of the film’s suffocating repression through a melodramatic lens, where the village’s central premise, that citizens must speak in near-whispers to avoid triggering lethal avalanches, serves as an elaborate metaphor for suppressed emotions and repressed desires, emphasizing how the characters’ extreme emotional control paradoxically traps and imprisons them.  In the fictional snow-covered, mountain town of Tolzbad, where the snow is always falling, yet due to its precarious position, even the slightest noise may trigger an avalanche, requiring everyone to remain quiet, never making a sound, as Maddin explores the tension between the propriety required of Tolzbad’s residents and the passions and frustrations which drive virtually all of the film’s major characters to their tragic ends.  Modeling itself on the German mountain film genre of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, known as Bergfilm, which was a highly popular cinematic movement during the late Weimar Republic which celebrated the majesty of nature and human endurance in alpine settings, as popular to German audiences as Westerns were to Americans, like Arnold Fanck and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s THE WHITE HELL OF PIZ PALÜ (1929), starring Leni Riefenstahl in a classic alpine survival tale, or Riefenstahl’s directorial debut, THE BLUE LIGHT (1932).  The irony here is that Maddin comes from the province of Manitoba, which happens to be the flattest region of Canada.  Curiously, both Maddin and Rainer Werner Fassbinder worked to ensure that the lead characters, even in the cheapest of films, are lit and framed like movie stars, while never afraid to utilize the most hackneyed of plot twists to advance the storyline.     

A key aspect to Maddin’s films, most of which receive state funding, is structured around artifice and recognition, film and memory, creating a fever dream of a world that relies upon the imagination triggering the root of our subconscious memories, as beneath this surface politeness and courtesy lies a moral rot of depravity.  To achieve that end, the filmmaker works with 16mm, 8mm, and even two-strip Technicolor, styles that would otherwise be considered obsolete, while also using set design, props, and costumes in a deliberately unnatural effect, highlighted by over-lit and saturated photography, alternating tinted monochromes with what looks like worn-out Technicolor, creating a netherworld that strongly recalls Robert Wiene’s THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), a seminal work of German Expressionism, while also resembling Carl Theodor Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).  Maddin also draws upon 19th century European literature, where the level of tragedy is so excessively over-the-top melodramatic, the more overwrought the better, while also utilizing various avant-garde film traditions from the silent era that vehemently reject a naturalist aesthetic, where the constantly unsettling and super-charged atmosphere, along with the use of high-contrast lighting, twisted sets, and histrionic performances, with dialogue delivered in a highly stylized way, are all associated with German Expressionism.  In this case, form really is the subject, as everything is magnified through that artificial lens, which is how Maddin develops his cinematic art.  His previous film, TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988), was rejected by the Toronto Film Festival, but premiered at a midnight screening in New York that drew audiences for an entire year, much like David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977) had done years earlier, both developing cult followers, with Martin Scorsese and critic J. Hoberman both championing this film as well, which led to a regular position at The Village Voice as a film commentator, literally jumpstarting a literary career.  The fact that he writes his own films, while also controlling the visual and textural component of his films, with their uncanny recreation of archaic modes of the past, creates a rare cinematic fantasy with exaggerated visual tones and narrative excesses that can be difficult to decipher, yet his auterist art has become synonymous with a peculiar Canadian cinematic identity that is powerfully introspective, so deeply rooted in the imagination and a melodramatic sensibility.  Part of this may come from growing up in the winters of Winnipeg, where surviving the eternal darkness all winter long helps make these dead things come alive.  It’s important to note that you don’t have to be a film aficionado of silent cinema to appreciate how unsettling the whispered nuances of this film can be.  To this he adds surrealist elements, like the father as an infant losing an eye to an exposed pin on his mother’s brooch, getting maimed during a hug, which actually happened to Maddin’s father, literally pulled from his family history, which may also have influenced his 5-minute short ODILON REDON OR THE EYE LIKE A STRANGE BALLOON MOUNTS TOWARD INFINITY (1995), based on an actual Odile Redon lithograph from 1882, which was used in the first translation by Charles Baudelaire of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry.  Maddin actually studied economics and began his professional career as a bank employee before leaving work to make his first short film, THE DEAD FATHER (1985), a surrealist, off-kilter horror tale, where his eccentric reputation has only continued to grow after that.  Maddin is one of one, where there is no one else like him, yet he’s an acquired taste.  However, if you see him in person, the man is fabulously entertaining and utterly hilarious.

Something hidden.  Go and find it.                                                                                Go and look beyond the Ranges –                                                                                      Something lost behind the Ranges.                                                                              Lost and waiting for you.  Go!

—The Explorer by Rudyard Kipling, 1898, quoted in the opening narration by Herr Trotta (Victor Cowie)

Beginning with an extended prologue that sets the tone of the story, told in two parts, with the cautionary introductory innertitle, “Careful, children, careful!” Tolzbad’s inhabitants are taught from childhood to whisper, suppress their desires, and live in quiet desperation to avoid disturbing the snow, subverting the typical male virility, as in Tolzbad, men are weak and live in the shadow of imposing women, namely their mothers and fiancées, exposing their inherent anxieties.  “The passions grow on high mountains and fling their red blossoms to the storm.  Perhaps the boy has mountain fever!  It begins innocently enough, with dreams of mountains, a peak round as a plump knee, or a crest like a frosted bosom white as goat’s milk.  Who could resist the temptation to climb?”  Like old tragedies, Maddin’s films have a love affair with ghosts, like the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father, or the spectral presence of Franz (Vince Rimmer), the attic-bound brother in this film, or the buried bodies unearthed from the frozen snow to the horror of the villagers.  Johann (Brent Neale) and Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) are brothers and butlers-in-training, beloved by their mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska), who hates their brother Franz, whom they do not speak of and who has been exiled to the attic.  The ghost of their dead blind father (Michael O’Sullivan), described only as a hapless swan-feeder, appears to Franz to warn him of impending doom in the family, yet Franz, paralyzed and mute and covered in cobwebs, can do nothing, with the ghost complaining that Zenaida never loved him and harbored love for Count Knotkers (Paul Cox) instead, although forbidden to marry him by the Count’s mother.  Johann is engaged to be married to Klara (Sarah Neville), although Grigorss is secretly in love with her as well, but says nothing, while Johann develops an incestuous infatuation with his mother, spying on her through the crevices in the walls, watching her as she undresses and bathes, concocting a love potion that causes her to sleep while he undresses her and ravages her breasts, with a Canadian flag seen waving in the aftermath.  Horrified at himself afterwards, he does unthinkable gruesome things to himself before throwing himself off the mountain.  Grigorss becomes the Count’s butler, but grows disgusted when his mother Zenaida rekindles her love affair with the Count after his own mother dies, wasting no time, leading to an absurdly hilarious moment when Grigorss challenges the Count to a duel at the dinner table, believing he is dishonoring his family, with things only spiraling more out of control after that, evolving into an utterly demented melodramatic tale.  Does Oedipal cinema exist anywhere else like this, sons who struggle with images of fathers who are either too strong or too weak, sons desperately in love with their mothers, or daughters with their fathers, parents who destructively choose one child over another, fathers and sons in competition with the same woman, and the hysterical acting out of these family traumas.  All this and more are at the heart of this film, which captures a deeply disturbing psychological state of mind more than any recognizable narrative, described by Maddin himself in a tongue-in-cheek review in The Village Voice, “Careful is a pro-incest mountain träumerai shot in the two-strip Technicolor used in that holy year of 1929.”  This manages to convey everything the viewer needs to know about the village’s deep-seated repression in strikingly visual ways, using cut-out mountain landscape panoramas from small-scale models, which only begins to describe the full repertoire of visual tricks and techniques employed by Maddin, but what it really reflects is the passion and intensity brought by the filmmaker, who became the youngest recipient ever of the Telluride Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, while the director has maintained that his biggest honor to date has been the film’s screening in Paris as part of the hundredth anniversary celebration of the birth of cinema, which also took place in 1995.

Guy Maddin's Top 10 | Current  Criterion

Resurrection (Kuang ye shi dai)

 

Director Bi Gan 

director and cast on the red carpet at Cannes

Shu Qi at Cannes, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RESURRECTION (Kuang ye shi dai)                       B+                                                       China  France  USA  (160 mi)  2025  d: Bi Gan

Unlike any other film you’ll ever see, a radical departure from any other cinema experience, Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, the maker of such extraordinary films as 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) and 2019 Top Ten List #6 Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan), has been described by Canadian writer, critic, and Chinese film curator Shelly Kraicer, who lived in Beijing for more than a decade, as the anti-Jia Zhangke ('Resurrection' review by Shelly Kraicer), now moving in a completely new direction, more modernist, with a stream-of-consciousness spirit, as movie references abound, becoming an ode to cinema and a lamentation for our times, creating an imaginary sci-fi universe that lives only in the imagination, which becomes the beating heart that lives within us, coinciding with the life of dreams, which cease to exist when the body dies.  But new life emerges with every subsequent conscious existence, allowing the life cycle to begin again with a true out-of-body experience.  Seemingly inspired by the darkly immersive atmospheric tone of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), writer/director Bi Gan and co-writer Zhai Xiaohui spent years in the lab constructing a new cinematic vision for this film, which was literally years in the making, as his last feature was seven years ago, but this nearly three-hour venture is a different kind of cinematic excursion that requires an open mind, as it simply resists logical evaluation and sets itself apart from the rest, like a time-traveling experience existing almost entirely in dream language.  A late edition to the Cannes lineup in 2025, added just five days before the festival began, winning a Special Grand Jury Prize, where jury president Juliette Binoche likened it to an “unidentified flying object,” the film has been re-edited since that initial premiere, yet it remains confusing enough, where it will be difficult for anyone to make sense of this sprawling epic work that simply goes places we’ve never been, yet the acclaim for this film will likely only grow over time.  Unraveling over the course of 100 years, like an anthology of short stories without chapter headings, told in six segments, with each one corresponding to one of the six senses recognized in Buddhist thought (The Six Sense Bases), sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind, where the protagonist in each segment is Jackson Yee, a Chinese actor, singer, and member of boy group TFBoys, who takes on five different roles, working with the director for a year and a half to make this film.  While there are multiple movie references, which the director takes in new directions, it’s difficult to say where this stands in Chinese movie history, as it’s remarkably ambitious visually, creating something onscreen that is simply unimaginable, yet it remains distanced and aloof, only occasionally connecting emotionally, leaving viewers befuddled and perplexed at the audaciousness of what they’ve just experienced.  Ultimately the film is something of a puzzlebox that the director himself wanted to watch, which makes perfect sense.      

Title cards explain that the film is set in a post-apocalyptic future when humanity has achieved immortality, but only by giving up dreaming, while those that continue to dream are called Deliriants, outcasts viewed as monsters that are knowingly veering towards their own death, living on a different level of human existence from the others, supposedly “bringing pain to reality and chaos to history.”  Using narratives that transcend space and time, moving from Silent-era German Expressionism to film noir to a Chinese ghost story to a phantastical vampire love story, shot by Dong Jingsong through various color filters, the film utilizes a film-within-a-film technique, opening in a silent movie theater, where film is considered part of an ancient forgotten past, with Bi Gan’s film dealing with the resurrection of dreams, of cinema, and of memory itself.  We discover a woman known as the Big Other, Shu Qi from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001),  THREE TIMES (2005), and 2015 Top Ten List #9 The Assassin (Nie Yinniang), who is capable of seeing through illusions, and is assigned to bringing Deliriants back to reality, sent to hunt them down, just like the hunt for Replicants in Blade Runner, gifted with the rare power to perceive these illusions for what they truly are, as she chooses to enter the monster’s dreams, determined to uncover the truth that lies hidden within.  Starting in an old Chinese opium den, elaborately constructed, like a dollhouse, featuring a multi-level space with adjoining rooms, windows, and walkways, each rendering a different activity, Resurrection (2025) Dir. Bi Gan : r/CineShots YouTube (46 seconds), but occasionally an outsized human hand intercedes, as she follows a secret underground passageway, like falling down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, where she discovers a grotesque Nosferatu-resembling Deliriant (Jackson Yee) munching on raw poppy flowers to help stimulate his dreams, but they are killing him.  Unable to understand his irrational compulsion, she discovers a movie projector for a heart, and decides to load it with film, allowing him to replay his past life in dreams before dying, as a series of four elaborately constructed dreams (framed by a prologue and epilogue) unfold before our eyes, with a brief shot of a wax candle melting and Shu Qi’s voiceover coming between each section, chronologically representing an unnamed historical period and a different period of cinema, which acts like a portal into the world of the subconscious imagination, taking us upon a shape-shifting odyssey through illusion, beauty, and terror that takes him across a century of cinema and to the end of time.

What stands out in all three Bi Gan films is the complex visual style, each featuring extended one-shot takes that extend beyond 30-minutes, become a signature aspect of his filmmaking, which is never less than enthralling, arguably a natural extension from the seductive, all-consuming style that began with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s neon-splashed, adrenaline-rush submersion into the techno-scored nightlife of Taipei in MILLENNIUM MAMBO, connected, of course, by actress Shu Qi.  Tinged with science fiction and fantasy, with a layered synthesized soundtrack by French electro-duo M83, while paying tribute to various movie genres, it’s important to note that in every iteration, the character Jackson Yee portrays is an outlaw, with a dream sequence moving into the lead-up of WWII and film noir territory, shot using a blue color filter or featuring the pervasive use of the color, where he appears to be a musician/spy suspect/political prisoner who is both reviled and revered because of his voice, capable of inducing madness in men, a homoerotic object of desire for both the Composer (Yan Nan) and the Commander (Mark Chao), one wanting to hear his voice, while the other wants to unlock his precious secrets, FNC 2025 | Resurrection (Bi Gan) (51 seconds).  Nearly indecipherable, this mysterious segment involves a fleeting reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH (1943), an elaborate prison, a lengthy interrogation, a near-death train incident, a missing suitcase, a theremin, an Orson Welles’ LADY OF SHANGHAI (1947) house of mirrors, a panicked train station engulfed in fog, the stabbing of eardrums, and the last sounds heard, the warbling sounds of a Bach song, BWV 478, “Come, sweet death, come, blessed rest” played on a theremin which magically closes one world while opening another.  That song foreshadows a series of deaths that are yet to come.  The next sequence jumps ahead to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s, a winter’s tale with snow inexplicably covering the ground of an abandoned Buddhist monastery, where a former monk, known as Mongrel, goes on a looting spree of locating Buddha statues before destroying them, all part of destroying the old ways, yet succumbing to a fever-inducing toothache, using a broken piece to knock out his rotten tooth, inducing the “Spirit of Bitterness,” who takes human form (Bi’s uncle, Chen Yongzhong, appearing in all his films).  The two engage in witty banter before the spirit, assuming the appearance of his late father, transports us into his dreamworld, reflective of a Chinese ghost story, revealing a mysterious backstory, offering a window into China’s dark past, where a dog reflects the karmic punishment for betraying the past, with Mongrel quickly realizing the past cannot be destroyed, as it exists in our minds and imagination.

Jia is a con artist during the onset of China’s market economy in the 80’s, who schemes to win prize money offered by an Old Man crime boss (Zhang Zhijian) who executes people who cross him.  In a world ruled by money, Jia befriends an orphan (Guo Mucheng), teaching her a card trick, hoping to convince the Old Man in the supernatural, or that she can identify a card simply by smelling it.  Posing as Jia’s daughter, even while blindfolded and wired to a lie detector machine, she manages to outwit the Old Man and win a cash prize, which they split before Jia leaves town and is immediately robbed and left for dead.  Meanwhile, the Old Man summons the girl for his real purpose, having abandoned his own daughter years ago, but longs to read a burnt out letter she wrote before she died in a fire.  Using the power of smell, she surprises us all by reading aloud the full contents of the letter written to an absent father.  In what is arguably the most elaborately staged segment, the pièce de résistance is a nearly forty-minute single-take tale that begins with a fireworks sequence, shot with breathtaking technical brilliance, mostly through a red color filter of rainy streets and smoky nightclubs, set during a millennium celebration on New Year’s Eve in 1999, as the Deliriant is reborn as Apollo, a reckless young hoodlum who has never been kissed, but is unfazed watching someone get strung up near the docks, yet when he meets a free-spirited young girl Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi), who may be a vampire but has never bitten anyone, his fortunes turn, no longer feeling alone.  As they run through abandoned buildings and back alleyways like the young kids in Godard’s ode to youth, Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), caught up in a world of dream and reality, this becomes an evocation of youthful hope and joy at the dawn of the new millennium.  But there’s a catch, as she works for a mob boss, Mr. Lu (Huang Jue), feeding on blood that he supplies from his victims, turning into an eerie vampire love story, including an astonishing nightclub sequence, Resurrection (2025) - Nightclub Karaoke Scene YouTube (9:18), with its constantly moving camera, where Apollo gets the snot kicked out of him, but he perseveres, using a time-lapse technique to go from night to the next morning, yet just when they think they can escape it all, kissing passionately on a barge right out of Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934) in the moments before sunrise, their own combustible passion self destructs, effectively ending their dream.  In an epilogue, Shu Qi’s Big Other wraps things up, dressing up Apollo to resemble the original Deliriant, setting his corpse free in a gigantic vault filled with liquid, Resurrection 2025 Movie Ending Scene YouTube (2:16), returning us back to the wax movie theater filled with illuminated patrons, but one by one, each light goes out until only darkness remains, as the film ends with the theater, like time itself, melting away.  Yet if this film proves anything, it is that dreams, or inner freedom, is the one thing that cannot be controlled by outside forces.