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| 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
