☆ ☆ ☆ ½
The
Forbidden Room (2015) – G. Maddin
I wanted to love this and on one level, I
really do. Guy Maddin’s latest is a
triumph of style over substance, perhaps his most eye-popping feature yet. The screen bubbles and melts and exudes raw
colour in a variety of cinematic fashions (silent, old technicolor, sixties
schlock, etc.). Things are typically
outlandish, silly, and sometimes gruesome or sexy. The high concept here is that Maddin decided
to recreate some lost films based on surviving descriptions or scripts alone,
films that Maddin himself really wanted to see (but obviously could not). After all, he is also a film historian of
sorts (with interesting pieces in Film Comment that I am half-remembering
now). So, 4, 5, or 6 films have been
sliced and diced and welded together to make a deranged feature film
(apparently to secure funding that the shorts could not). The result is largely incoherent as a sum of
parts but there are so many wild vibrant moments across the 2 hours – and
thinking of this as an experimental film really helps matters. Probably though it is not for the uninitiated
and there are other easier entry points to Maddin’s oeuvre (My Winnipeg, 2007,
is my favourite thus far, of those I have seen). But really, just wow.
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