Des trous dans la tête !

Make no mistake about it, Canada's Guy Maddin is an enigma. We're talking about somebody who's main inspiration seems to be old Soviet newsreels (the Kino Pravda series,to be exact,by Dziga Vertov,the father of the newsreel). Watching 'Brand Upon The Brain' was very much like watching an old Kino Pravda (Cinema Truth,by the way,for those who don't speak Russian)newsreel while running a temperature about 110 degrees,while on a mixture of psychedelic mushrooms washed down with codeine based cough syrup (and I wouldn't want it any other way!). The plot (but who needs a plot in a film like this?) concerns a middle aged man who is by some strange twist of fate, named Guy Maddin, returns to the island he grew up as a young boy, and hasn't been back in over 30 years,to try & clean up the old lighthouse/orphanage he grew up in. All I can say is....man!....if I had as screwed up a childhood as Maddin had, I guess I would turn out making films as bizarre as Maddin's are (not that I'm saying that's bad,mind you---check out his short film 'Heart Of The World',which won an award some years back as the best experimental short at some film festival who's name I forget). Although the film features a cast of unknowns (on these shores at any rate),it benefits from a narrative by Isabella Rossilini (daughter of Ingrid Bergman & Roberto Rossilini),who is unfortunately never seen on screen. Honestly, you can do a lot worse than not seeing 'Brand Upon The Brain', but why would you want to?

Writer and Director Guy Maddin's interesting homage to silent films. It is about a man named Guy who returns to his childhood home on an abandoned island and asked to paint a lighthouse by his aging mother. As a child Guy was subject to his bizarre parents secret lives running the orphanage he grew up in. He unearths a strange world of disturbing science experiments and diabolical schemes. This movie gets weirder as it goes on. It was shot on 8mm film and that works well for the movie. It was written in about 5 weeks by director Maddin and filmed in much less time in Seattle. The actors are unknowns to the screen but I get the idea that they are all very theatrical trained stage actors. It is narrated beautifully by Isabella Rossellini and features a good musical score. It has a good look and feel and has a good pace but lacked something that I just can't put my finger on. Perhaps I expected to get in the head of Guy a little more. I had a better understanding of a lot of the other characters better then the leading man even with seeing the crazy life that he led. However, this film is worth a look for its uniqueness and style even if it's not the type of thing you may want to watch many times over.

Here's the problem: Maddin is an impressive filmmaker. He is important and has made at least two films that are important to me.

But he is not a very interesting person. So when he applies his mastery to making a personal film - a film essentially about his dreams and demons, it turns into something of a tragedy for the opportunity misspent.

This really is a wonderful film in the way it is put together. The whole team seems be closely attuned, with a central role played by the editor. The sound effects are astonishing - and this is a silent film. The references, duly abstracted, from past masterworks are copious and respectful.

The narrative structure is suitably complex with manifold overlapping metaphors. The problem is that what we actually get directly from him is boring. Sex and mothers matter; dreams are real; nothing recedes. But we knew that better and more deeply than he shows.

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

'Brand Upon the Brain' is the perfect example of the kind of intriguing art-film still taking place in remote sects around the world. The kind of film that will go unnoticed by the majority of the film-making and film-going world. The film is heavily stylized and all the more engaging for it. The cinematography is washed out, hazy, even intentionally blurred at times, but consistently breath taking and beautiful. The starched white's bleed into the blacks establishing a nostalgic, dream-like quality. Overall the film is consistent in looks with Guy Maddin's 2003 silent film 'Cowards Bend the Knee,' it is myriadly more comprehensible than 'Cowards,' while by no means stepping into any mainstream consciousness. The film, for all practical purposes, is silent, but is lead, throughout, by an animated Isabella Rossellini, who often narrates the action, at other times is the voice of the characters or the voice of their subconscious. The film also heavily relies on naturalistic noises, artificially produced as sound effects to sporadic events taking place. This treatment of sound, so well executed that Maddin's crew deserves an Oscar for best sound editing, contributes to the overall sense of a hazy dream state. Which is precisely where we join the main character of the film, Guy Maddin, as the film opens. He is traveling by canoe back to the island that he grew up on. His family and a host of orphans inhabited a large lighthouse on an ambiguous island. His mother is dying and needs him to repaint the lighthouse, with two coats, so that she may visit it before she dies and remember it how it was. As he paints he realizes he is painting over the past and becomes lost in memories of abandonment, sexual promiscuity and confusion, an over- bearing mother, a treacherous and loving sister, immoral scientific experimentation, and the hi-jinx of a child brother/sister detective team, among other acts of sexual experimentation, near incestuous contact, voodoo curses and paganism. To say the least the film is sprawling, but it is pulled together nicely through cyclical imagery and themes (though this film is out there, the cyclical nature of themes in films about families is pretty standard), but it works nonetheless. The editing of the film is up to par for Maddin. Jarring, painfully emotional and crass. Another aspect of this film that will likely be overlooked by the advertising teams whom decide what films people are going to go and see. The film is short, only clocking in at around an hour and a half, but it is fast paced and the kind of film that you walk out of knowing, whether you felt it was brilliant or not, that it was worth how ever much you had to pay for it, a unique experience that Hollywood will never be able to offer an audience and that the assimilating forces of independent film don't offer audiences often enough.

Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin's ecstatically perverse jaunt into childhood's protracted gestation period is a hypnotic murk-fest filled to the brim with Sturm und Drang neo-psychedelia. Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) returns to his childhood homestead, a lighthouse to restore it with two coats of paint for an ailing mother. Outsized delirium takes over: ghoulish rituals, surreptitious experiments, demented ghosts, social vampires and other phantasms of psychosis of an overextended memory is underpinned by distinctly Freudian impulses turned into artistic statements. The miscegenation of silent-era aesthetics, a mosaic of encoded visual cues and Maddin's continued fascination with high theatricality punctuated with trippy pop iconography delivers a Gothic fever dream that remains etched in your mind, whether you like it or not.