I went to see Guy Maddin narrate his autobiographical docufantasy, My Winnipeg, last night at the Royal.  It was splendid: the film, the ambience, the fascinating and handsome young man I ended up standing in line with for an hour and then sitting beside! Mr. Maddin looked more like a linebacker than an artist and he seemed in such a good mood that I suspected weight-gain from atypical anti-psychotics, but then I always think that. (I can feel your chubby fingers on the computer keys, dear reader, and I’m wondering the same thing about you.)

The crowd was full of people who looked vaguely familiar, barely famous, denizens of the local arts community no doubt: stylish women in their fifties, scruffy young men who smelled like film students. Cougar alert!  And then I saw Jackie Burroughs, who is my favourite actress, and quite stellar in Maddin’s earlier “Careful”. I’m too shy to approach any one I like but I positioned myself inconspicuously proximate and eavesdropped. She was charming to one and all, and tiny. She bumped into the equally tiny Louis Negin in the lobby and they hugged like passionate garden gnomes. Folks stepped around.

The movie itself was a funny and heartfelt slice of whimsical Freudiana. Mr. Maddin, trapped his entire life in his own private Winnipeg, gets the idea to film his way out. It contains his usual themes: sleepwalking, sadness, incest, beauty salons, hockey, uber-Mother. In fact, the film’s like a cover version of his earlier, darker “Cowards Bend the Knee”, with a little of the Soviet agit-prop from “Heart of the World” stirred in during the general strike scenes. But frankly, he can remake his one movie ad infinitum and I’d be more than happy. He always finds new twists and freshly striking imagery; he’s so wildly inventive he could film the phonebook as far as I’m concerned.

This film’s main addition to his visual lexicon is the cut-out silhouette. This sharp-lined technique provides quite the contrast to his usual impressionistic faux-antiquarian fuzziness. I thought the silhouette moments (cut-out strikers on the march, charging gay bison) rudely interrupted the visual mood; I will have to decide later whether that’s a good thing or not– rude interruptions being so deliciously dramatic! 

The pièce de résistance in this film was when panicking horses fleeing the great fire through the Red River (or was it the Assiniboine?) become flash-frozen right into the ice. Later the startling scene becomes a popular stroll for Winnipeg lovers. We see the cheery, fur-swathed couples cavort among the stiff, terror-stricken horse heads as they walk along the frozen river. Like Guy’s best images, it’s ridiculous and tender, strangely evocative of authentic feeling by way of utterly artificial means.  

Is there a literary equivalent to Guy Maddin?  Some brave novelist willing to tell the lies that need to be told about this country? Some poet with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a penchant for turn of the century murder ballads? Some short-story writer forever haunted by the highly specific traumas of his Northern Ontario up-bringing as handsome as I am? I wish there were, dear readers, I wish there were.