Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands

It's not in Guy Maddin to make what Hollywood people would call a "normal" movie. Armed with 8mm cameras, loads of lights, sound effects (if not actual sound equipment), and a mind like a steel Dziga-Vertov trap marinated in Winnipeg and sex and murder, he makes movies the way he damn well pleases to do them, which usually are done like super-kinetic, libido-charged fever dreams that come to represent a kind of consciousness that could be misconstrued as a music video if not for the fact that it's a 1920's silent film about revenge-plotting women and blue hands ala Evil Dead that kill innocent victims while hockey is always a major subject (and, sometimes, with players in full wax museum mold).

It might not always make sense- and by this I mean relatively to some of Maddin's best and strangest like Brand Upon the Brain! and The Saddestmusic in the World- but it's never less than boring and always more than enough for the open-minded. And by this I mean open-minded enough to find oneself in the horror-movie world of a hockey player named Guy Maddin (yeah, not the first time and wont be the last the director has a character named by himself), who goes through a psycho-sexual-homicidal journey through a pair of blue hands which belong to a devious girl's father. They aren't actually his hands put on his, however, they're just painted blue. But there's an effect that comes with this: the hands kill ala Evil Dead without Maddin really wanting to. So come a series of events involving wax-painted hockey players who can come to life, an abortionist that works out of a beauty parlor, another woman who cant stand how Maddin waxes her legs, and, yes, plenty of frenetic Canadian Hockey.

That's what it's aboot, so to speak, but there's more, much more, particularly in Maddin's 10-chapter set-up, and featuring Beethoven's 7th among other classical selections (frankly I enjoyed the 7th in Saddest Music more, but this is even crazier, which helps). Everything moves at such a pace and clip you wont know what stops and goes. But Maddin's mind works wonders as a master of his craft and at relaying his own personality and life experiences in the framework of what is essentially a really demented B-movie. It's like with Jodorowsky: he makes movies with his you-know-what as opposed to his head. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Well, this is quite probably one of the most uncategorisable films I've seen - you couldn't possibly call it a comedy, with its beauty salons that moonlight as abortion clinics/brothels, and its disturbingly self-lacerating portrait of the director as a cowardly lecher and cold-blooded murderer. But parts of it are hilarious. Go figure. In brief, the plot concerns Guy Maddin, hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, who takes his pregnant girlfriend to the above-mentioned clinic for a termination and then leaves her (literally in the middle of the procedure) for the brothel-keeper's beautiful daughter, played with incandescent and slightly scary intensity by Melissa Dionisio (that surely cant be her real name, can it?) only to discover that she can't allow herself to be touched by a man's hands (an uncharacteristically direct quote from Lon Chaney's 'The Unknown') until her father's murder has been avenged. And then she produced the jar in which she keeps, preserved, her father's hands... After that we get a twist on that old chestnut 'The Hands of Orlac', combined with a surprisingly explicit dose of sexual excess and weird psychology, as young Guy ends up in deep trouble of every sort imaginable, through his own inability to control his lusts. Told in ten chapters of six minutes apiece, this was intended as a gallery installation but it works just fine as a movie. As long as you don't mind a regular dose of jawdropping strangeness and a large splash of shocking, unfathomable directorial masochism.

By turns a dark comedy, horror film, Gothic love story, and heartbreaking drama, "Cowards Bend the Knee" is a magnificent carnival of the bizarre. It carries the typical Guy Maddin style, which imitates silent, experimental cinema-normally mixing it with dark humor and surprising poetry. In this film, Maddin uses his style to the best of its ability by a forming a unique, genre bending masterwork of the avant garde. Mixing slapstick, sex, and scares Maddin creates an otherworldly and wholly surreal experience around a wacky plot that involves revenge, decapitated hands, hockey, abortion, and a fake breast.

Sounds weird, right? Well, it is. It really, really is.

...and for fans of weird, surreal cinema it's a real treasure. I found myself laughing and shaking during this wild feast for the eyes. It has its moments of disorientation and confusion, but within those moments lies a deep and subtle beauty. Guy Maddin is similar to Jim Jarmusch because his films are like cinematic poems, but while Jarmusch seems to be making beat poetry, Maddin makes completely off the wall, experimental poetry!

I've seen many of Guy Maddin's films, and liked most of them, but this one literally gave me a headache. John Gurdebeke's editing is way too frenetic, and, apart from a tour-de-force sequence showing a line of heads snapping to look at one object, does nothing but interfere with the actors' ability to communicate with the audience.

Another thing I disliked about this film was that it seemed more brutal than Maddin's earlier works--though his films have always had dark elements, his sympathy for the characters gave the movies an overriding feeling of humanity. This one seemed more like harshness for harshness' sake.

As I'm required to add more lines of text before IMDb will accept my review, I will mention that the actor playing "Guy Maddin" does manage to ape his facial expressions pretty well.

When you love someone deeply, everything seems deep. When you love them in reality, sometimes the experience is ordinary.

Real films have that element of romance and in a way a filmmaker has arrived in my life if he or she makes a film that doesn't affect me. But of course that's after this person has already burned a door into my heart.

Maddin is on my list of the very best filmmakers, and on a much shorter list of the ones that matter and are still working. He's changed the way I dream. Some of the visual humming I do to myself is his tunes. So I consider it a sort of triumph to have a relationship with him where he says something that matters to him, and he says/shows it with the same skill as before... and it doesn't matter to me.

Its a sort of transcendent Zen thing to be able to know something so deeply to be able to discard it easily.

This is a film put together from his own life. Its a different sort of narrative adventure than we usually get from him. Usually we have an inner substrate, a narrative model made explicit in the movie that is preserved enough for us to see the contrast between it and the way we are seeing it. A virgin's diary, a sad song. Here, the narrative is a life proper. The reason it fails for me is that I already know what I need to about this mind, because he gave us sticky artifacts that are sent out into an ether where souls flit. This time, he cannot do that, the artifacts stick to his embodied life, not mine. For me to accept this, I'd have to have some sort of resonance with him as a human.

And I don't. I cannot. Its part of the arrangement when you begin as we have: he's the sender, I'm the lucid receiver. We both cannot be receivers, the way he has structured his art. I think I will advise you to stay away from this if you are serious about Maddin. It will take me some time to recover the ability to accept things from him as selfless, world-connected art.

He knows this. There's a bunch of business about humans as wax statues.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.