In an interview with Film Comment magazine, the madcap Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin describes the different movie genres he’s re-creating in “The Forbidden Room.” There’s the “virgin sacrifice volcano movie,” a submarine picture, a Western, the “Japanese shamed-father genre,” and of course “a lot of different vampire films, because they’re radically different from culture to culture.”
Even this sampling — there are more — doesn’t hint at the gleeful mishmash of “The Forbidden Room,” which presents a series of fever-dream glimpses of Maddin’s imagined world of old movies. This thing is either for straight-up surrealists or fans of long-gone movie styles. That’s a narrow margin, but within it, Maddin thrives.
As in previous films like “Careful” and “The Saddest Music in the World,” Maddin makes his material resemble antique film footage, rescued from the floor of some poorly-maintained storage vault.
Working here with co-director Evan Johnson, Maddin flits from one scenario to the next, eventually nesting the various stories inside one another. Or sometimes not.
The onscreen silent-movie intertitles are gloriously exact reproductions of the typography and language of distant eras, with some laugh-out-loud flourishes. The scenes themselves are lovingly close to their original genres, until they run off the rails.
When the trapped sailors in the submarine must conserve oxygen, they utilize the air pockets found within pancakes. The lumberman who stumbles into the rituals of an ancient tribe is challenged to tests of prowess that include finger-snapping and “offal-piling.” Two men turn into blackened bananas in the middle of a sequence. And yet they keep speaking.
Maddin made the film in Paris and Montreal in front of live audiences, for some reason (the Paris material was shot by Seattle cinematographer Ben Kasulke). Some recognizable people briefly float by, such as Charlotte Rampling and Mathieu Amalric.
Plus, there’s arthouse mainstay Udo Kier in a variety of roles; he also croons a song, which I assume is called “Another Derriere,” about a man obsessed with bottoms.
The only rap I can make against this daft exercise is that two hours is a long time to navigate the Maddinverse. Evidently the film inspired many walkouts when it showed at Sundance earlier this year, and I guess I can see why. A movie that detours into the dreams of a dead man’s mustache is surely not for everyone.
“The Forbidden Room” (3 stars)
Madcap Canadian director Guy Maddin concocts an overlong tribute to various old-movie styles, meticulously re-created in exaggeratedly bizarre pieces. The movie’s suitable only for surrealists or fans of long-gone genres, but those groups will find it hilarious.
Rating: Not rated; probably R for nudity
Showing: Northwest Film Forum
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