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

The Return (Vozvrashchenie)

 

 

THE RETURN (Vozvrashchenie)                  A                                                                              Russia  (106 mi)  2003  d:  Andrei Zvyagintsev

Why did you come back?  Why?  Why did you come get us?  You don’t need us.  We were fine without you, with Mom and Gran.  Why did you come back?  Why did you take us with you? What do you need us for?                    —Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov)

Described by this first time director as “a mythological look at human life,” this is one of the more starkly austere and emotionally spare films one could see, completely absent of anything unnecessary, but always direct and to the point, given metaphysical implications, reminiscent of an earlier, somewhat similar film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s DISTANT (Uzak) (2002) that accentuates an excruciating loneliness, as the feelings in this film are so grim and remote, like a poetic glimpse into the human soul.  Remarkable for its spare storytelling that relies upon long, wordless sequences, the beauty of its stark reality is shockingly emphasized, like a Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness journey into the unknown, where one comes face to face with their ultimate fears.  What’s also surprising is the amount of unanswered questions raised by this film, which remain unresolved mysteries through the end, deeply entrenched in a primal ambiguity.  Structured into a series of episodes, the film marks seven days, each identified by intertitles, beginning with the introduction of two young brothers, Andrei (Vladimir Garin) and Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov), ages 15 and 13, who bicker and fight, like brothers do, but they’re also symbiotically attached, cut from the same cloth, demonstrating an intense closeness.  An early scene shows a group of young boys jumping off a tower into the sea, calling anyone who can’t do it a coward, so all but the youngest succeed, leaving Vanya temporarily stranded atop the tower, unable to face his fears.  Hours later his mother (Natalia Vdovina) climbs up there to console her child shivering in the cold, offering maternal grace and a warm blanket, suggesting he’ll jump when he’s ready, reassuring him that everything’s all right.  But the kids tease him when they see him again, excluding him from their playful activities.  Offering something of a diversion, Andrei races him home, each ready to tell on the other, but their mother quiets them, as their father (Konstantin Lavronenko), absent for 12 years, has inexplicably returned, sleeping in their mother’s bed in an identical position of Andrea Mantegna’s 15^th century painting, The Lamentation of a Dead Christ, Lamentation by Andrea Mantegna.  The boys are struck by his physical presence before running upstairs to confirm his identity, viewing a photograph kept in an illustrated family Bible, known by only a single photograph.  This simple gesture has a way of aligning the two boys even closer, as they’ve been together through all the years the father was absent, both a bit stupefied by his presence.  Their mother offers them no clues.  Again, without any explanation, he takes the boys on a journey, presumably a fishing trip, where they slip further and further away from civilization, into the most remote wilderness, eventually landing on a desolate island where they pitch their tents.  The older brother is glad his father has returned, while the younger brother isn’t even sure if this is his father or not, thinking he may be leading them astray to slit their throats, for all he knows, and sulks and disobeys his father every chance he gets.  This father uses few words, but offers severe and sometimes brutal consequences for disobedient behavior, which includes smacking these kids around, bloodying their noses, leaving them out in the rain, which makes them wonder why he’s returned at all.  But they’re so used to his absence that they continue to ignore him even when he’s present, seeing him as little more than a stranger.  Their rebellion leads to a sort of LORD OF THE FLIES mentality, as if they don’t adhere to his rule, then they’re really turning their backs on all rules, which leaves them in a precarious position.  It appears to be no accident that the younger child actor is named after the child hero in Tarkovsky’s Ivan's Childhood (1962), with both facing their own individual perils, where the innocence of youth is cut short, while the older child is named after Tarkovsky’s second film ANDREI RUBLEV (1966).     

In the spirit of The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), with echoes of Abraham and Isaac (Impossible Ethics: A Response to the Sacrifice of Isaac ...), the tension between father and sons builds continually throughout the journey, introducing Oedipal themes, exuding a heightened sense of reality, augmented by a dirgelike soundtrack that only accentuates the emotional and psychic distance between them, where Vanya is the moody core of the story, refusing to play along, angry and irritated at being ordered around by a total stranger, spending much of the picture sulking alone, silently.  His father’s response is harsh and at times cruel, an enigmatic and tortuous Stalin figure, leaving Vanya on the side of the road and driving off for hours at a time, forcing him to endure endless hours of pelting rain in the cold.  His absence is never discussed, no questions about his past are ever asked, and little, if any emotion is ever exhibited by the father.  His behavior is bewildering, yet the children offer unbelievably authentic performances.  While Russia historically is a patriarchal society, despite being called the Motherland, Russian films, including those of Tarkovsky, often reflect absent fathers and nurturing mothers, while also using recurring symbols of water and rain, natural forces of eternity that may also reflect a cleansing of one’s sins.  There is a morality tale at play here, as the children are constantly questioning the authority of their father, which may as well be a question for the nation, having endured a long history of brutal dictators, a brief hint of democracy, but then a return back to the rule of despots with Putin.  Using heavy force and humiliation, the father attempts to teach his sons hard corps discipline, military style, fueling speculation that he may have been in the military, but also survival techniques out in the woods, taking them on a long and arduous journey driving an 80’s GAZ Volga Stationwagon before traveling by boat, eventually reaching a remote, completely uninhabited island.  While they have a burning curiosity about him, wondering where he has been, why he has come back, how he has been spending his time, viewing him as a terrifying figure that they have every intention to love, but there are continual interruptions en route, with their father making inexplicable phone calls, presumably to some mistress nearby, but we never really know.  The boys grow tired of being ordered around, becoming more and more defiant over time, with Vanya eventually learning to despise him, extremely suspicious of his motives, having little use for him, feeling more liberated without him.  The stunning cinematography is by Mikhail Krichman, who would go on to shoot all of the director’s films, whose slow panning offers a strong sense of foreboding, given extraordinary weight, meticulously establishing the mood, capturing the natural beauty in the landscape with long, unbroken silences, while often changing focus several times within the same shot, given the artistic complexity of a Tarkovsky film, where the final shot actually resembles the final shot of MIRROR (1975), as does an earlier shot of the mother smoking on the porch during the unexpected arrival of the absent father, with a strikingly original soundtrack adding considerable depth, setting an atmospheric tone.  Resembling Bergman films shot on Fårö Island, offering a rugged and distinctive landscape in a remote location, this film was mostly shot at Lake Ladoga, Europe’s largest freshwater lake, located in northwestern Russia between St. Petersburg and the Finnish border.

Winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2003 Venice Film Festival for both Best Film and Best First Film, exactly as Tarkovsky had won the Golden Lion for his own debut 41-years earlier, IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962), yet for Siberian-born Zvyagintsev, a former actor and TV director, this remains, arguably, the director’s most dramatically powerful and artistically accomplished film, and his most accessible, while also among his most exquisitely edited, though one ghastly tragedy happening shortly after the completion of the shooting resulted in the unfortunate death of Vladimir Garin who played the older brother Andrei, drowning in a lake not far from where the movie was shot.  In his acceptance speech, a visibly moved Zvyagintsev dedicated the Golden Lion to Garin.  The Cannes Film Festival of 2003 was similarly affected by the death of Emin Toprak, one of the lead actors in Ceylan’s DISTANT (Uzak) (2002), co-winner of the Best Actor Prize, who perished in a car accident shortly after that film was completed.  Part of the film’s emotional center is the struggle the boys have in attempting to develop a new relationship with their father, which seems on again and off again several times before they actually reach their destination, as just when he is about to send his two sons back on the bus to their mother, he inexplicably changes his mind, with Andrei identifying with his father, while Ivan feels cut off and exiled, as if he never existed.  While on the island the father goes off on individual hikes exploring the vicinity before asking his sons to join him, showing them an observational watchtower that overlooks the entire island (that Ivan refuses to climb), leaving the boys plenty of time on their own to squabble about his absence, wondering if he could have been in prison, or has a criminal background.  The father is on a quest to retrieve something buried on the island, digging a fairly deep pit to find it, yet viewers remain clueless what it is, as it ends up having no bearing on the real story, which is the developing family dynamic with its shifting moods, with the father trying to turn them into men, which he actually succeeds in doing, much to the surprise of the boys themselves, but circumstances dictate a hastened maturity, particularly in Andrei, assuming his father’s role (seen wearing his father’s watch), developing skills and instincts well beyond their years.  Most likely it’s the first time the boys have even been apart from their mother, leaving Ivan especially affected by her absence.  Like the Stalin era, there are hidden secrets that we never learn, especially about the father.  This absent father syndrome mirrors the loss of so many soldiers in World War II, with the Nazi Army coming within 20 miles of Moscow in what was a Red Army wipe out, a devastation of human losses, where throughout the war 22 to 26 million Russians died, or 15 – 20% of the entire population.  Historically, this was a moment of great trauma and suffering, and a psychological shock to the nation.  Perhaps this historical realism is at the root of the spiritual revelations of this film, recreating a similar shock, a deep psychological trauma, where perhaps the father’s absence is viewed as an act against nature, and it comes to represent a kind of allegorical elegy, and only through a spiritual transcendence or human epiphany can one appreciate and celebrate a renewed meaning of life.  There’s a photographic aftermath that celebrates their lives together, captured in monochrome snapshots from Andrei’s camera, like diary entries, with the boys playing around, mostly smiling, revealing a spontaneity that never previously existed, leaving viewers with a stark, dreamlike idealization.  For a film that offers few emotions throughout the journey, it certainly pays off with one of the more explosively emotional endings imaginable, as it is wordless, yet moves effortlessly and uncompromisingly to its natural conclusion, summing up the entire film in the last breathtakingly beautiful final twenty minutes.  The original music by Andrey Dergachev (aka Dergatchev) is hauntingly eerie and atmospheric, and at the end, solemn to the core, Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) OST - YouTube (5:07).