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By PAUL BRENNER
Guy Maddin has never been a
filmmaker to tread lightly over forbidden areas
and, as forbidden areas go, incest is one of the
most charged and lurid. But even with filmmakers
who take a running jump into incestuous waters, it
is difficult to imagine any filmmaker, living or
dead, who would be so gleefully willing to turn
incest into the basis of a hilarious comic
fantasy, which is what Maddin accomplishes in his
1992 feature "Careful."
"Careful" takes places in an Alpine dream world,
where villagers are so repressed that they fear to
utter loud noises so that they do not cause
horrific avalanches from the precarious peaks
towering over their tiny village. Maddin's mad
debauch of familial eroticism occurs in a
two-strip Technicolor visual splendor, the murky
pastels and tinctured images anticipating Maddin's
later film "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs."
Once again Maddin's encyclopedic love of late
silent/early talkies period of film history (with
allusions to "King of Jazz," "Glorifying the
American Girl," Keaton, Lloyd, and Sternberg)
intermingles with other early talkie film styles
-- in this instance an hallucinatory mixture of
German Expressionist films, mountain films, and
the two-strip Technicolor musicals. Maddin's
overheated melodramatic overtures play blissfully
ignorant of the candy-colored visual feast
engulfing the taboo subject of incest. The
head-snapping dialogue reflects the mad and
maddening proceedings, as in this dialogue
exchange -- "Oh, Claire, you are a wild one!" "So
are the reindeer when the summer is coming."
The Kino Video DVD contains audio commentary with
Guy Maddin and screenwriter George Toles. Also
included is a fantastic one-hour documentary about
the Guy Maddin oeuvre called "Guy Maddin: Waiting
for Twilight." |
