My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin | 2008 | Canada
80 min

In Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, the director films his autobiography into a docudrama. None of the secrets of the city or his family are spared his intense scrutiny and he lays his life bare, almost naked, for artistic consumption. It’s the best and only form of self psychoanalysis by way of filmic recreations that anyone has ever performed or anyone has ever seen, but it asks the question, how obsessed can a man be with his own life and history. For Maddin, the answer to that question is insignificant for he asks “Who gets to vivisect his own childhood?”

The film is a dreamy odyssey into the mind. Its effect is hypnotizing, even if all we see is never completely hypnotic. I’ve always wondered how a film that employed the literary “stream of consciousness” to film would seem like and My Winnipeg is the answer. The effect is at times difficult to follow — thoughts, internal monologues, history and subjective opinions all overflow in fragmented layers that need to be discerned as we watched. For me, the effect was like reading James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces -– interesting at first, but tiring and sometimes repetitious. The narration is also verbose and punctuated by words never found in common conversations: gynocracy, opiating, confabulations.

The film has numerous charms though. Many memories seem borne out of repression, mostly sexual. Maddin’s quest is understandable. Who hasn’t lived in a city and found himself in a love/hate relationship with it. If familiarity breeds contempt, Maddin is most familiar with his town and its rich, dark, strange history of sleepwalkers and secret séances, leading to his contempt of it as well. Historically significant moments in Winnipeg that occurred during the last century are recreated, none more memorable than an accident where horses feel into a river during winter and froze to death, their heads forming a macabre bust on the snowy surface. Even significant family memories of the director are recreated by hiring lookalike actors in the role of his siblings, as they were in his childhood, filmed at Maddin’s childhood home, rented from its present owner. A strange film of many, many moods, if ever Charlie Kauffman or Michael Gondry were to make a documentary, perhaps this is how it would turn out and even if My Winnipeg is inconsequential to anyone but the director, he makes it universal enough for anyone.