It's Tough to Escape What Happens in 'Winnipeg'

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. She knows what her girl does in the back seat of the car, and she's not above threatening suicide to gain the upper hand in the endless war of family life. She has all the real but terrifying charms of a faded and bitter film actress -- which makes sense given that she is played by Ann Savage, a veteran B-movie actress and television fixture in the 1940s and '50s.

And yet, in her own monstrous way, she's a remarkably sympathetic character. That mix of sympathies parallels the masterly manipulation of tone that makes Maddin's work so compelling, entertaining and powerful.

Maddin has called his new film a "docu-fantasia" about his home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba, 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 a farewell to the city, the director's effort to "film his way" out of the town he grew up in.

To find his way out 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.

It is a delightful conceit, not least for what it says about the power relation between cinematic memoirist and the subjects of his memoir. The film opens with someone off-camera coaching the actress who plays his mother on how to say her lines. Mama may or may not have ruined his life, but the filmmaker is now in total control of the narrative. Throughout the film, Maddin claims to be trapped in his city, caught in its byways and memories, a sleepwalker in his own world. But there is ample winking going on about who has the real power once the camera is on.

The family bits are interwoven with scenes of snowy, cold Winnipeg, with a poetic narration taking the film down one bizarre path after another. There are buffalo with magnetic powers, buried rivers, gay bison who start catastrophic stampedes, a mayor who personally judges the "golden boy" contest, and laws governing the treatment of sleepwalkers. And then Maddin goes on a tear about the loss of the old hockey arena and the greed of the NHL. It is all wildly self-indulgent and frothy and weirdly poignant.

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. And Moore will probably never insert a long ballet sequence (recalling Maddin's earlier film "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary") into one of his documentaries.

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 docu-fantasia is going to be promoted by the tourism board. And 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.

My Winnipeg (80 minutes, at AFI Silver Spring) is not rated but contains nudity and sexual situations.