My Winnipeg

Film: My Winnipeg, 2007
Director: Guy Madden
In a nutshell: Madden's surrealist B&W "docu-fantasia" pays tribute to his home town.


There are some terrific ideas in My Winnipeg, Madden's dreamlike exploration of memory and the notions of home. Here are some: in an attempt to unpack his confusing upbringing, he hires actors to play his siblings, and has them re-enact scenes of childhood trauma with his real mother. He also introduces us to Ledge Man, the long-running TV show in which Madden's mother persuades a suicidal man to climb safely back inside (this happens in every episode, and Ledge Man has been running for fifty years). He explains that Winnipeg has ten times more sleepwalkers than any other city - somnambulism is so prevalent that a bylaw allows its citizens to carry keys to their childhood homes, where the current owners are obliged to take them in during nocturnal visits. And he chronicles key events in Winnipeg's history, such as the winter the cold snap came so quickly a team of frightened horses was frozen in a lake and their dead heads—emerging from the ice in a rictus of terror—became an attraction for local skaters.


When the film is occupied with tales like these, it is a Borgesian delight. When, however, it strays into the realm of art student pastiche, it almost undermines its own inventiveness. For example, when he intercuts dramatic text (the word "betrayal", for example, set in white against a black background like the intertitles of a silent film) with static images, this is supposed to create layers of meaning.  Instead, it feels laboured and artificial. In one especially dull sequence, the word "lap" is repeated, along with images of a woman's naked lap, a map of forked rivers, and animal fur, creating a litany: "the fork, the lap, the fur". The lap is his mother's. The fur coat is hers also. The rivers trap the city of Winnipeg and prevent escape. You can see what Madden is aiming for: totems of the comforts and perils of home. The poetry of apron strings. But it doesn't resonate. It's a tin note. Oh, and boring.


Can techniques like flashing arthouse text and heavy-handed Freudian self-analysis still be considered "experimental" once they've been aped by a hundred second-year film students? Admittedly I've seen only one other film by Madden - his collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, My Dad Is 100 Years Old - but it too is full of contrived psychosexual imagery (Rossellini spends a good chunk of that film wriggling about on a giant pillow meant as a stand in for her late father Roberto's imposing naked belly). It's clearly a favoured theme. My Winnipeg garnered rave reviews, so there are those who enjoy this sort of thing—but at times I felt the film verged on self-parody.


My Winnipeg is the dream of a man on a train, trying desperately to leave the town of his birth, or at least work out why he can't. "Maybe I can film my way out," he says. Ultimately, he doesn't. But he gets close.