Archangel

Part black comedy, part romantic drama, and part horrific war film-"Archangel" manages to blend these genres with its consistent surrealist style, the style that practically all of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's films are made of. Before I continue this review I'd like to point out that I absolutely ADORE the films of Guy Maddin. I think of him as the Canadian David Lynch (and Lynch is my all time favorite filmmaker, so that's high praise), but comparing him to other icons doesn't truly do his work justice. He certainly has his own, distinct style, his films always mimic the visuals of a silent film, particularly those of Eisenstein. He also experiments a lot with use of overdubbing dialogue, a dreamlike atmosphere, and bizarre, dark humor. His style is not for everybody, but for those that can appreciate this oddball genius his films come across like underrated treasures, and "Archangel" may just be my very favorite.

This film is both gruesome and powerful, it makes a statement about dealing with love and loss, while also entertaining us with its wacky plot and laugh out loud humor. I had a ball watching this bizarre, tragicomic tale, mainly due to its fast paced nature and heavy surrealism. Those who seek an other wordly experience will likely adore this film, for I think it best captures Maddin's famously odd style. The acting is at times somewhat wooden, but its obvious that this is the movie's intent. Much of the jokes are performed in a completely deadpan and slightly awkward manner, which makes them even funnier.

The dialogue is great, the visuals are beautiful, the story is brilliantly weird, and I cannot find a single problem with this little masterpiece. Those who enjoy the avant garde must see this film as soon as possible!

It's not worth really pointing to one particular performance or even the music (which is eerie and sublime all at once) even though everything needed to come together to make this as absorbing as it is. What Archangel has above all else in Guy Maddin's vision and concepts, somewhat like David Lynch's Eraserhead before it and not many other films since, is the singularity and commitment to placing you directly into a world that you know is not realistic, but that is the point after all. You are in the hands of someone who is showing you artifice and you know these people are often in rooms or in a warehouse somewhere in Canada, and (not but, and) it's is an epic of despair.

This is a capital D Deam of silent and experimental/avant-garde cinema, and excavation practically of a dream in a sense, and a dream-cum-nightmare of war, and it looks at the world of Patriarchy (from male romantic dominance to how someone disciplines a child. There is also such glorious absurdity and as soon as those folks packed into that small house on the outskirts of Russia tend to that child who just had a stroke for some reason (!) With careful and gentle horse brushes all over his body (!!), you know this is something you have to take on its crazy terms.

But then again war is crazy, and the people who create Boogeymen out of the likes of the Bolsheviks - big monster men with big ears and big claws, after all, and can only be taken out after a coward uses his expunged intestines to strangle the brutes - should be mocked. Like in a Dream, or a nightmare, or a mix of light and dark together (like an Avant-Garde cup of coffee), it is not something that you piece together logically but by how it is based in spme unidentified place in time with a protagonist who is losing his grip on his own constructed reality (if it was there at all).

Archangel is unique also as both romantic and ironic storytelling at the same time, and it is an incredibly tricky prospect for Maddin to balance both tones but he kind of gets there, and I don't mean just that with Boles and the woman named Veronika who he says/demands/confusingly misremembers is Iris; the shots where characters get on horses or carriages, which you know was done in a room with like fake snow being blasted at someone's face and a rocking from side to side on a low grade rig, it speaks to something we love about how tactile the movies can be and how they conjure such visions that can *only* be done on film. This also goes to moments and shots where it is those two actors sharing the frame or looking at one another (sometimes with memories intact and sometimes... not).

Is some of the dubbing sketchy? Actually, not as much as you'd think (or now that I told you the movie is dubbed with dialog it already has an uphill battle, right), and because of the milky and smoky black and white atmosphere and the equally play-dress up and believablity Maddin has some breathing room to have his actors mouth to their movements and the artifice plays into it all. And are there moments or times when the pacing gets a little odd? Sure, it's an Expressionistic Canadian (post?! Kind of WW1 memory piece about memory loss and gruesome male dominated violence!

But it is so much fun and you can feel the heart and sweat put into it while none of it feels like it had so much effort as could have happened on a low/microbudget. There's madness and kindness and, again, rabbits and weird gooey blood, and it all works.

This wierd, dreamlike film goes a long way on a limited budget, creating a completely unreal experience about a real historical event in Archangel, Russia during the Russian revolution.

Like all of Maddin's other films, Boles is and anti-hero, his subversive obsession with Veronika could not be interpreted as love or heroic, a brillliant deconstruction of your average war movie.

The ending is a bit disappointing (out of the brooding character with the rest of the film) but in all a great film.

The idea that one made a silent-era looking feature in the early 90s didn't sound as compelling to me, on account that I hear all kinds of crazy ideas all the time and that I'm very familiar with the David Lynch universe; but the fact that the person who came up with the idea would also execute it with such authenticity (to the point that aliens knowing nothing of human chronology would list "Archangel" among Pudovkin's "Mother" and Dreyer's "Joan of Ark"!), makes it for one of the most hardcore comedies I've ever seen. Most people wouldn't laugh, this is an inside joke, for either comedians, or people with great sense of humor, or people of the film industry to pick up. After 15 minutes in, I stopped caring about the "idea" behind it, and a sentence kept coming inside my head every next scene, making me either smirk or laugh: "The Balls!.. The Balls!..", meaning: ".. the audacity to troll the world like that!"; the same kind of feeling I had while reading Joyce's "Ulysses"!.. I understood little of the plot, since, suffering from the critic's malady, as I've confessed before, I was, in vain, trying to draw parallels between the movie I was watching and movies from the silent era. I just got that there is an amnesiac soldier in post-great-war's Russia, obsessed with a girl who is in love with some other amnesiac soldier! At some point, an accident turns her into an amnesiac as well. Each technique helps us get into this confused trio's chaotic psychology; the highly saturated black&white photography (to the point there are no greys), the use of sound and silence, the abrupt transitions tactlessly switching the previous scene's tone (a cacophony very common in even the most masterfully edited classics of the silent era), the blurs in our frames' corners, as if caused by humidity, or, at times, as if some heavy snowflakes have landed over the lens; well, life is a confusing bitch for even the sanest among us, let alone for amnesiacs who have to battle against the Bolsheviks right after they battled against the Germans! Life is a confusing bitch, why would we demand from art to make sense?.. Fellini wondered once. What makes "Archangel" more than just a troll picture is the consistency of Maddin and his collaborators to accomplish this look, and create an experience that overstuffed viewers, like me, can say is unlike anything they've seen before.

The sophomore feature from Winnipeg director Guy Maddin confirms the promise of his offbeat 1988 debut 'Tales From the Gimli Hospital', although perhaps with a hint of understandable redundancy. Maddin's peculiar aesthetic is the same, borrowing extensively from the primitive vocabulary of early sound productions (circa 1928-1930), but this time the action is updated from Icelandic fable to the Russian Revolution, a popular setting for Hollywood melodramas during the late silent/early sound era. Every anachronism is flawlessly presented, from the flickering black and white photography to the scratchy music score and crude post-dubbed dialogue, but like 'Gimli Hospital' the macabre (to say the least) plot is pointed straight at today's midnight cult cinephiles. Only the details are different: instead of dead seagull therapy and ritual butt-grabbing duels to the death (both highlights of the earlier film), audiences can enjoy an odd, amnesiac love quadrangle, climaxing when one character uses his own intestines to strangle the Bolshevik barbarian who disemboweled him. Not surprisingly, comparisons have been drawn to the early films of David Lynch, who next to Maddin is more in the same league as Frank Capra.