Last summer I took a gig hosting a film screening and lecture series at a library well north of Toronto. In a sterile meeting room upholstered with folding chairs and an extravagant hi-def projector that nobody employed there knew how to use, I began the series by screening Beshkempir, a 1998 Kyrgyz-language Bildungsroman. It’s a poky piece of social realism shot in a country most of my viewers had never heard of, but was a unanimous hit amongst the crowd of suburban housewives and budding cinephiles. The reaction to the second (and final) film I screened was even more startling.
The movie was Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, one of my favourite Canadian features of the past decade. My idea was that these eager armchair film scholars would learn how vibrant, exciting, and bizarre their national cinema could be. Their response? Not so much.
As I began to suss out feedback, one woman furrowed her brow and shook her head, grumbling “I couldn’t find one thing that I liked about it.” My attempts to defend the film, its extraordinary humour, its stylistic idiosyncrasy, its riffs on American cultural imperialism, and the obsessive peccadilloes of its director fell on deaf ears. Whether they got it didn’t matter. They disliked it.
As I prepared to pack up my notes and get back on the roundabout bus route home to my downtown basement apartment, there was a stir of dissent in the ranks. An older, Eastern European man popped out of his metal chair and ardently defended the film’s clever use of montage editing, and its cartoonishly tragic thematic flourish. Not only did this crotchety retiree get Maddin’s film. He liked it a whole lot too.
Guy Maddin was in Toronto recently, hosting a series of lectures, screenings, and discussions at the University of Toronto. Unofficially dubbed “Maddin Mania” by co-organizer Kay Armatage (the official title was the bulkier “Guy Maddin: Confession and the Cinema of Uninhibition”), the event was an unqualified success, with scads of students, film buffs, and screwball townies packing the university’s Innis Town Hall. As evinced by the scores of at-hand Maddin maniacs (or would-be converts), plenty of people seem to be getting Guy’s films. But, packed house or no, an event like this can prove problematic.
When you welcome a filmmaker of this calibre into the academic institution, you run the risk of further distancing his work from a popular audience. This wouldn’t be such a sticking point where it not for that fact that Guy Maddin, in my estimation at least, is Canada’s premier populist filmmaker.
During a string of introductions on night two of Maddin Mania, Toronto International Film Festival co-director and cineaste-about-town Cameron Bailey acutely described Maddin as Canada’s national filmmaker. And it makes sense. Behind the veneer of his stylistic peculiarities, Maddin trades in distinctly Canadian forms, churning out shorts (The Heart of the World, Glorious), jibes at what Canadian cinema scholar Jim Leach has called our tradition of “documentary-realism” (My Winnipeg, which took the Best Canadian Feature prize at TIFF 2007), and most notably, melodrama (Careful, Saddest Music, and more or less everything else he’s done).
One thing that emerged out of the four-day frenzy of Maddin Mania — besides how intelligent, candid, and wildly funny Guy himself is — was his preoccupation with melodrama. While the term often brings to mind the well-soused domestic drama of Douglas Sirk or the inflated histrionics of a Lifetime movie of the week, Maddin stressed that “good” melodrama presents emotion stripped of pretense. No furtive glances between lovers! No tender handholding! No posturing! No time for timidity or hesitation! Irony be damned! Only naked intention! Heartbreak! Tragedy! Emotional calamity!
Post–Slumdog Millionaire, it’s easy enough to gobble down a bit Kyrgyz filmmaking and empathize with the flat universality of its themes, at the same time indulging the typically Western tourist impulse (“Their clothes are different from my clothes!”). But presented to a room of suburban housewives acclimatized to Can-Cin’s weepier dramatics, one of Maddin’s films may seem baffling, alienating, wacky, or whatever. His filmography is harder to recognize as our own because it doesn’t present itself as The Red Violin or Anne of Green Gables, or whatever we’ve come to expect Canadian cinema to be. But (and here’s the kicker), Maddin’s movies are precisely these kinds of movies.
The difference is that he refuses to slow-play the melodramatic impulses of movies like The Grey Fox, Passchendaele, and everything Atom Egoyan has done. Unlike Egoyan — with his strained families, hidden secrets, mawkish string sections, and increasingly humorless stabs at self-seriousness — Maddin can get emotional without all the maudlin posturing. And all his resounding emotional primitivism is echoed in stylistic appropriation of largely bygone film forms. It’s as if he’s trying to reverse-engineer an origin story for Canadian cinema: one that shuns Bombardier corporate films and Yankee-subsidized Mountie adventures, and instead carries the kernels of our whole existent cinematic traditions, from the melodrama, to the docudrama, to the NFB short. It’s at once characteristically Canadian and defiant, a stiff, sissy-boy slap against our nation’s diagnosed proclivity toward politeness. It’s at once the frankest expression of our national cinematic tendencies and a surrealist remedy for them.
And sure, maybe in ten years we’ll be able to recuperate Egoyan’s ham-fisted heartstring plucking as some clever riff on Joe Eszterhas–styled pulp erotica. But until then, Maddin’s strain of melodrama seems the more decent, and honest, proposal.
(Pictured, Isabella Rossellini and Mark McKinney in a scene from Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World. Photo courtesy of IFC Films)
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