Word: winnipeg
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...Savage, the virulent megabitch Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer's cheapo noir classic Detour. That was 62 years ago, and now, at 86, she is the icy Queen Maddin, standing in for all the city's overbearing women. (As narrator, he says, "Never underestimate the tenacity of a Winnipeg mother"). Still she pops up unbidden in her filmmaker son's memories. Again she quizzes her daughter Janet when the teen comes in to report that she hit a deer and a passing motorist helped put the creature out of its misery. Mother twists the story into an accusation that Janet...
...Before seeing My Winnipeg, all I knew about the city was that Maddin came from it. After seeing (and adoring) the movie, I'm still not sure how much of it is verifiably true. A ramble through Google tells me that, as the film tells us, Winnipeg did have a huge department store, Eaton's, where the locals did most of their shopping, and an iconic hockey venue, the Winnipeg Arena, home of the Maroons in the Senior Hockey League and the Jets of the NHL; both these historic sites have been razed. In 1942 the city really did hold...
...considering that My Winnipeg was sponsored by Canada's Documentary Channel, you may wonder how many of Maddin's other assertions are factual? Does Winnipeg have "10 times the sleepwalking rate of any city in the world"? Is it really "the coldest city in the world"? I don't know. To me these sound like the boastful statistics that adults feed to an imaginative, impressionable boy, and that stick in his head forever - like the image of those frozen horses...
...After Sunday's screening of My Winnipeg, Maddin took some questions about his "docu-fantasia" on the Manitoba city he's lived in all his life. A man in the audience stood up and said he'd been born and raised there before moving to Toronto, and that he liked it. "Don't you like Winnipeg?" the man asked accusingly. Maddin smiled and replied, "You're the one who left...
...That home life, where father Charlie was off managing the Winnipeg Maroons hockey team and mother was clearly in charge, was so formative to Maddin that he's often recreated it in his films. Here, he decides "to vivisect his own childhood" by renting the old homestead for a month, casting actors as his three siblings and shooting scenes he remembers or imagines from his youth. Savage continues to impersonate his mother; his girlfriend's dog appears as Guy's long-dead pet chihuahua; and since, just before shooting starts, the woman who rented the place to Maddin decides...