Et les lâches s'agenouillent...

Understand that I'm getting a bit tired of people comparing every strange movie that comes along to a David Lynch film too. Unfortunately, Lynch is the norm and just about one of the most accessible strange filmmakers out there, so sometimes the comparison is needed for a starting point, like in this case.

This movie is, roughly speaking, the story of a swinging hockey player who gets entrapped in a bunch of relationships, including most prominently one with a scarred daughter who wants her father's death revenged. Her father's killer? Her mother. It includes but is not limited to perverse sexuality, weird psychoses, and severed arms.

It's shot in black and white and is a silent film, which creates for it a sort of removed surreality/abstractness which is, honestly, reminiscent of Eraserhead and Lynch's Lumiere and Company short.

What makes it Maddin's, though, is the use of imagery from his childhood (the barbershop, the hockey players, etc.) set to a blatant sexuality which goes beyond just being blatant but enforces it: you see the sexual image, and then the words follow saying exactly what you were thinking. No more subtlety and deranged fetishes, this is straight-forward Freud and primal scene.

Because of this, this film as a whole remains true to itself and never lets go of its own private Universe, one that we could never live in and yet, terribly, can relate to, figure out, and eventually even understand.

Beyond that, there's not much that can be talked about this movie besides the fact that it there's no common approach to it. It has no genre (besides maybe Silent film) and is disconcerting, requiring a certain level of viewer interaction that most movies don't ask for. For fans of strange and insane cinema, it's great; for anybody looking to be entertained, this is most definitely not for you.

--PolarisDiB

Many people have compared Maddin to David Lynch - although there are some psycho-sexual similarities, they have it wrong. He's the Tom Waits of film. To watch his films requires not the suspension of disbelief, but an open subconscious.

Throw your mind away and enjoy this film. Hockey players ensconced in sperm and a combination beauty salon, brothel, day care center and abortion clinic all make appearances here. And an interesting story mixing "Hands of Orlac" in reverse and...well, a lot of Maddin. Unlike any film experience you'll see, but you'll come away a better and more open person because of it. And Melissa Dionisio is the most stunning actress I've ever seen on screen.

For people new to Maddin, I'd recommend starting with The Saddest Music in the World, which really works as a movie and a story and almost makes sense from a realistic point of view.

I come away from his films glad that we have somebody who thinks like that, and glad that he put it on film.

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.

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.

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!