My Winnipeg, the latest from Canadian filmmaker and friend of the Screengrab Guy Maddin, was commissioned by the Documentary Channel, but as noted here recently, it's hardly the straight history-travelogue that the title might suggest. It's an impressionistic, semi-satitic tribute to the hometown of his fantasy life that Maddin's feelings about the city as a taking-off point, the way his recent "autobiographical" films Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! take off from his feelings about his memories from his early life. Those feelings, as they come through here, might best be described as affectionate but haunted. In Maddin's telling, the entire city is a folksy snowscape where people might yearn to get away but aren't awake enough to formulate an escape plan. "Guy", our hero and narrator (played by Darcy Fehr) recalls that for a hundred years, there was a yearly, day-long, city-wide treasure hunt, and the prize was a train ticket out of town, but nobody ever used their winnings because, after spending a day exploring the city, no winner could bear to leave. At the same time, Guy says, Winnipeg has ten times the number of sleepwalkers of any other city; at night, the sidewalks are clogged with folks who've gone to bed only to stagger outside and wander zombie-like through the cutting winds. It's as if their subconscious minds where sending their bodies a message that their brains don't want to hear. Guy, who himself would dearly love to leave but can't, murmurs to himself, "Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake!"
Naturally, Maddin's feelings about the place he grew up in are tangled up with his feelings about his family, his mother in particular. (She's played here by the 1940's starlet Ann Savage, best remembered as the female lead in Egdar G. Ulmer's febrile noir Detour, in her first film role in more than twenty years.) Eager to get at the roots of his unresolved childhood issues, Maddin decides to move back in with Mom and use some of the film budget to hire actors and a dog to "play" his siblings and his "long, long, long-dead chihuahua", Toby. ("Because Mom doesn't want Dad left out, "we pretend to have had him exhumed and reburied in the living room.") This idea, which is partially borrowed from Albert Brooks's Mother, generates some laughs but not a lot of mileage. (It didn't generate much mileage in Mother either, where it proved good for fewer laughs.) In general, My Winnipeg feels as if it were made to order; it lacks the fever-dream obsessiveness of Maddin's best work. But it's very funny and consistently entertaining. It turns out that Mom stars in the only dramatic TV series ever made in Winnipeg, Ledge Man, in which she plays the mother of "an overly sensitive man" who each week has to be coaxed back inside after climbing out onto the ledge over some perceived slight. (It's been running for fifty years and Mom hasn't missed an episode.) And the stream-of-consciousness narration suggests a previously unsuspected influence on Maddin's work: Ken "Word Jazz" Nordine. It's nice that cable TV is doing its part to keep Maddin working, but My Winnipeg gave me a feeling that he really ought to have his own late-night radio show.