a valentine to movie matinees
by
Douglas Messerli
Evan
Johnson, Robert Kotyk Guy Maddin, writers; with additional material by John
Ashbery) Guy Maddin (director) The
Forbidden Room / 2015
Guy Maddin’s
2015 film, The Forbidden Room, is an art-house film on grade B and C
movies from the silent era through the 1950s. With sly references to
cliff-hangers like The Adventures Pauline,
submarine adventure tales such 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea and Voyage to
the Bottom of the Sea, exciting Tarzan-like stories—only in the Canadian
Maddin’s case, played out in the cold Northwest with wolf-people and
trappers—films influenced by the Janus-myth such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and even more ridiculous tales including a
slightly incestuous relationship between a blind widow and her recently
mustachioed son, and a hilarious mystery, replete with Expressionist-like sets,
about a government attaché who suddenly finds himself murdering his double, who
is delayed in his murder by a former ostler, who tells yet another story
wherein, in memory of D. H. Lawrence, he recalls murdering his lover with his
mother’s laudanum. At moments, Maddin’s film seems like the hallucinated movie
described by the character Dinah, in Leonard Bernstein’s opera Trouble in Tahiti.
Maddin tells these tall tales, with a
large score of actors (Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Udo Kier, Mathieu
Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlotte Rampling, and Noel Burton among many
others, many of them playing several roles) with beautiful music such as
Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, while imitating
the intertitles of silent films, and presenting his images as brittle scenes on
decaying film stock which might at any moment ignite into flames—and sometimes
does!
The director, moreover, presents his
narrative, as one critic described it, as a series of Russian dolls, each
nestled in each other; or, perhaps to describe his method more precisely, it is
as he the director were leafing through a volume of childhood cinema images,
only to turn those pages back in the other direction before closing.
Indeed, as the stories within stories
within still further stories progresses forward and backward, we finally end
up, once again with the early submarine tale, where the men, missing oxygen,
are forced to eat flapjacks (pancakes are a returning motif in Maddin’s work,
as are bathtubs, women with necklaces, and virgins in distress) so that they
might find oxygen in their “air pockets.” The Captain’s room, meanwhile, is the
“forbidden room” of the title, but as the men begin to fear for their lives,
they rush into his domain only to find him dying within his bubble bath; the
lone survivor discovers, in a book hidden within another book—much like the
structure of the movie itself—where he encounters briefs of the best
“climaxes.”