Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2008)
My Winnipeg is a sweet, beautiful, artsy film. It blends historical anecdotes with creative fantasy and tells the story of a man who is trying his hardest to escape his home town, but who is compelled to stay by an unarticulated, dreamy beauty that Winnipeg leeches from every pore. We are shown the destruction of Winnipeg Arena, once home to the troubled Jets NHL team, and the group of free-masons who sneak into city hall to perform a séance that incorporates ballet and dance. Archival footage is blended with animated and live-action recreations. Some sequences are fantastically absurd, such as the horses frozen in the Assiniboine River with their heads peaking from the ice, but others are more sensible. Even as a Winnipegger, I occasionally struggled to distinguish the truth from fiction, but I guess that's not the point.
Guy Maddin spends much of the film recreating childhood memories using his real mother and three actors to play his siblings. The real meaning behind this docu-fantasy is hidden here. Childhood is a magical, often traumatic time, and the magic and myth contained within memories rarely stands the test of time. Our childhood home is replaced by a restaurant and the locations we used to visit for play have lost their special meaning. And how often is it that we remember something exactly how it happened? Sometimes it is more beautiful, and certainly more interesting, to remember things with a little embellishment and flavour.
The great filmmaker, Werner Herzog, often speaks of the ecstatic truth: a truth that you can only uncover by blending fact and fiction. There is a truth, a beautiful truth, lurking in performance, in construction, and in the human heart. A truth that cannot exist by speaking alone, or by telling a story how it really happened. For a deeper truth we must look deeper into how we like to imagine the banal and why we find the fantasy so compelling.
The final verdict: Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg is a very personal film. It is delightful and hilarious. It explores myth, memories and storytelling, and that special attachment to our home town that will forever hold a special place in our heart and that can never be properly explained to outsiders, an attachment that will never let us truly leave.
Professor P
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