Pity poor Guy Maddin's mother. The Canadian director's last film, "Brand Upon the Brain!," featured a psychotic, domineering mother who spied on her children from atop an isolated lighthouse. In his newest one, "My Winnipeg," an unhinged, utterly delightful "documentary" about his home town, his own mother (or a caricature of her) is a central character. She possesses a psychic ability to see through her children, to project onto them dark and demented desires.

Yet in her own monstrous way, she's a remarkably sympathetic character. That mix of sympathies parallels the masterful manipulation of tone that makes Maddin's work so compelling, entertaining and powerful. Maddin has called his new film a "docu-fantasia," and it's an apt label for an entirely idiosyncratic mix of local myth and history, dubious science, salacious gossip, personal rumination and endless camp humor. Filmed in black-and-white in Maddin's signature early-film style, "My Winnipeg" is supposedly the director's effort to "film his way" out of the town he grew up in.

To do that, he must confront his own past, so Maddin's narrator tells us that he has rented the house he grew up in and has hired actors to reenact traumatic scenes from his childhood. He intends to do this scientifically, as some kind of sociological experiment.

There are moments, especially when he is directly criticizing his city, that the voice of Michael Moore seems to come through. But Maddin isn't interested in merely indicting his home town. He wants to capture it at some level far deeper than an accusation.

The city of Winnipeg emerges as a lovable absurdity, a mythic yet claustrophobic place. One doesn't know what is fact and what is fiction, and in the end it doesn't matter. With its ample nudity, all manner of sexuality and long civic tirades, there's little chance this movie is going to be promoted by the tourism board. In the end, "My Winnipeg" doesn't even feel particularly rooted in Winnipeg at all. It is a fantasia on memory, place and loss, and Maddin's poetic and absurdist Winnipeg could be almost any small city anywhere.

-- Philip Kennicott (June 27, 2008)

Contains nudity, sexual scenes and disturbing images.