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

Left-Handed Girl (Zuopiezi nuhai)

 

Director Shih-Ching Tsou

director on the set

lead cast

Sean Baker with Shih-Ching Tsou

Left-Handed Girl (Zuopiezi nuhai)                B                                                                   Taiwan  France  Great Britain  USA  (109 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Shih-Ching Tsou 

Taipei-born, New York–based writer, director, and producer Shih-Ching Tsou received a Master’s in Media Studies at Manhattan’s The New School, where she met American director Sean Baker, who was studying non-linear editing, and has worked with him the past two decades, developing a shared interest in social realist films that were “true to life,” co-directing TAKE-OUT (2004) about an undocumented Chinese food delivery worker in New York City before producing Baker’s films Starlet (2012), TANGERINE (2015), The Florida Project (2017), and RED ROCKET (2021).  Premiering at Critics’ Week at Cannes, this is her first feature film, made on a miniscule budget, co-written by Tsou and Baker, who edits and co-produces, bearing many of their shared characteristics, like an intimate portrait of identity, resilience, and creative awakening, with a commitment to portraying underrepresented communities with honesty and empathy.  A single mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai, a model turned into a popular TV actress) with her two daughters, moody, teenaged I-Anne (Ma Shih-Yuan, discovered on Instagram), who yearns for her own emancipation, a symbol of youthful revolt on her everpresent motor scooter (echoes of Hou Hsiao-hsien), and impressionable, astonishingly natural 5-year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye), return to Taipei after several years of living in the countryside to open a noodle stand at a bustling night market.  With sizzling food stalls and crowded alleyways, the kaleidoscopic portrait and the chaos they encounter are part of the vibrant energy in the film, reverberating with the sounds of Ouch Potato YouTube (2:14) by Bleeding Fingers in the opening, mirroring the emotional urgency of the characters, where it is their spirit that guides this film.  Living in a cramped apartment above the food court that is much smaller than they realized, each in their own way will have to adapt to this new environment to make ends meet and succeed in maintaining the family unity, but three generations of family secrets begin to unravel after the youngest daughter who’s left-handed, is told by her traditional grandfather to never use her "devil hand,” which in many parts of Asia is considered a big taboo, exposing one to thousands of years of discrimination and stigma, confirmed by surveys of Chinese students since the 1980’s which report that less than 1% are left-handed (Two-Thirds of the World Still Hates Lefties).  Stripped down to a crew of five or six people, the film was shot mostly in the Tonghua Night Market, beautifully capturing the luminescence of the neon colors, shot entirely on an iPhone 13 Pro Max by cinematographer Ko-Chin Chen, assisted by his partner Tzu-Hao Kao, allowing them to move with extreme agility and discretion inside the night markets of Taipei, situations where a traditional crew with bulky cameras would have inevitably attracted attention and compromised the spontaneity of the scenes.  By working with such a common and non-invasive tool, the director managed to adopt an almost documentary-like approach.  

The standout achievement is among the better acting performances of the year, and it’s by a precocious, YI YI-like young girl (Yi Yi: A One and a Two..., 2000), I-Jing (Nina Ye, doing commercials since the age of three), who by the way introduces the film on video in the theatrical version seen and right away melts our hearts with her endearing personality, completely taking us by surprise with her unusual charm and wit, showing unusual maturity and resolve, not to mention inner drive, where she’s easily the best thing in this picture, capturing subtle emotional textures rarely seen in child acting.  Top student turned school dropout I-Anne dresses provocatively and earns money on her own selling betel nuts, a natural stimulant, and cigarettes from another neon-lit night stand nearby, often to bikers looking for a buzz, where she’s having a listless sexual affair with the married owner, A-Ming (Hsia Teng-hung), while I-Jing is free to roam the premises, expressing a carefree freedom as she has her run of the place, with no one to really look after her.  The set-up is familiar, on the same wavelength as Hirokazu Koreeda’s socially conscious film Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) (2018), as the protagonists come from a marginalized background, burdened by financial restrain and societal pressures, including issues related to migration, portraying present-day Taipei as a male-centric place where men are still much better off than women, who still suffer under prevailing patriarchal attitudes that typically downplay the needs and interests of women.  Full of layered conflicts and multigenerational tensions common in Asian families, what distinguishes this film is the portrayal of an adult world, yet mostly told from the perspective of the children, seeing the world with a fresh set of eyes, while delving into the existential question of what shapes a Chinese woman.  Each of the three protagonists faces their own emotionally charged struggles, yet prevailing themes include economic hardship, family miscommunication, and cultural tradition which are interwoven into the narrative, jumping around through the perspectives, using a stripped-back approach, prioritizing immediacy, realism, and emotional authenticity.  We follow I-Jing’s inner turmoil stemming from her grandfather’s rejection of her left-handedness, resulting in a secret shoplifting spree, stealing trinkets from the night market where she freely roams, where her hand is to blame, with the camera capturing her eye level as she wanders through the shops, or Shu-Fen shouldering the burden of overwhelming financial pressure, made even worse when she assumes the debt of her late husband’s funeral and medical bills, while the headstrong I-Anne is more than a troubled teen, rebellious and disillusioned, a prisoner of her own mistakes, carrying a deeply internalized psychological burden that is not revealed until late into the picture.  With families caught between tradition and change, what adds to the social pressure is the intrusion of scathing judgments and negative opinions from the extended family, which have a way of seeping into the mindsets of these women, who have a hard time living up to their expectations.

Tsou initially wanted to make this film twenty years ago, but felt there were too many characters, too many locations, and they lacked the resources, so they settled on making TAKE-OUT, revisiting the project several times afterwards, but funding was always the problem, until she met with representatives from the French production team at Le Pacte.  “As admirers of Hou Hsiao-hsien, they wanted to see more Taiwanese films on their screens.”  The story is very personal, coming from within the filmmaker’s own family, as the director is herself left-handed, corrected by her grandfather during a time when everybody was expected to use their right hand, yet she was also drawn to the unseen tension within traditional families, where daughters are still viewed as subordinate to sons, as male descendants inherit the family property, while women, on the other hand, inherit most of the debts, revealing how fear of judgment or outright rejection from society can led to secrets being buried for decades.  Even for Shu-Fen’s mother Xue-Mei (Xin-Yan Chao), it is about funding the business of her only son while also transferring her ancestral property to him, and in turn paying no attention to her daughters who actually need the money for survival.  By exploring the push and pull between tradition and individuality, what seems ordinary on the surface leads to unexpected twists that have a profound effect, resonating deeply in unexpected ways.  Beyond a family story, this is essentially a film about a culture of secrecy among women, across generations, where each character is hiding something, as in Chinese culture it’s important to save face, or put on your best front, where you have to conceal ugly things that you’re ashamed of.  By preserving everyone’s perspective, Tsou adds clear insight into navigating their individual worlds, where each in their own way, they’re just trying to survive, yet beneath a placid surface is unseen emotional turmoil filled with silence, repression, and unspoken pain.  In Taiwanese society, men are typically the heads of families, but in reality, it’s often the women behind the scenes, like Shu-Fen, who are the driving force, as they carry the emotional weight and quietly guide the direction of the family, as they are the glue that holds everything together.  Children are groomed for success, a reality every parent envisions, so Shu-Fen’s precarious position of falling behind in her rent doesn’t begin to describe the difficulty of having to ask her parents for money, a reality so many Asian kids struggle with, as they don’t wish to disappoint them.  Spending time in Taipei’s night markets, developing friendly relationships, Tsou followed the natural patterns and rhythms, and even based the character of I-Jing on a real little girl she met there.  What’s also essential are the inclusion of small little details that are uniquely Taiwanese, like the sounds of slot machines, or the different types of music overlapping, because each stall has its own, and even a garbage truck jingle playing classical music, creating a sensory, colorful universe, though the story shifts to a darker, more melancholy tone filled with a quiet sadness.  In Taiwan, especially for women, there are many unspoken rules about how to behave and what paths are acceptable, yet in the end, three generations finally confront one another in a wildly over-the-top spectacle that veers into the chaos of Thomas Vinterberg’s THE CELEBRATION (1998), with the truth literally exploding before our eyes.