Careful DVD (Remastered and Repressed Edition)

In hindsight, up to and including My Winnipeg, 1992's Careful is very likely Guy Maddin's best feature length film. It is a culmination of many of the things which keep film-lovers coming back to his work: Melodrama heightened to the high of pure comedy, Freud on a cocktail of speedballs and laudanum), flirtations with genre, and the aesthetic of the primordial days of filmmaking at the turn of the 20th century (with a more-than-a-hint of the grotesque generally not afforded at the time). When you enter the alien world of Tolzbad, leave reality at the door and soak in drama boiled down to its essence, and reconstructed as pure fantasy. The surrealism and idiosyncratic personality of his body work is often compared of David Lynch, but his idiom of resurrecting and reconstructing forgotten sub (-sub-sub) genres puts him in the vein of Quentin Tarantino. And lest I be branded some sort of leper for suggesting the latter comparison, I do not mean to imply the rock-star or mainstream appeal of the 'Pulp' director, but as a filmmaker that likely bottles himself in a video archives for days, weeks, months on end to soak up the juices of cinema before mixing and batching his own, unique and pleasurable concoction. For those of us who have drank the Kool-Aid, we feel you should too...

In the opening minutes we are told in an ominous voice-over that takes the form of a parent scolding their child for their own good. The village up in the mountains is isolated and remote, and one false step can have a person, "serenaded by the winds of their own death plummet." Boisterous behavior is verboten to the point where even a slight melody sung, or an argument with a sibling out in the open air could have an avalanche crash down and destroy everything. Thus, with everything bottled up inside, the folks of Tolzbad are a seething cauldron ready to boil over.

But first, happy and strange times. Grigorss and Johann live with their mother Zenaida in a blissful state, a dance after dinner, while ignoring the crippled brother up in the attic who has taken to brooding after the tragic death of father (a plummet, naturally). Lessons for the boys at Butler school where they train to serve the local aristocracy have to be seen to be believed, acting as one of the most farcical asides. A spring love blossoms between Johann and the one of the local girls, Klara, which leads to a quick marriage proposal. Yet the puppy-dog feelings awakened for Johann in Klara ignite a darker, incestuous lust for his own mother. Confusion ensues, curiously not so much for Zenaida, but rather Grigorss who has his own feelings for Klara and has been living in the shadow of his golden-boy brother.

Things do not exceed as expected - as they rarely do in a Guy Maddin movie - and this becomes a jumping off point for all the repressions, desires, and dark secrets of the denizens of Tolzbad, both alive, and dead. Once the cat (or in this case, swan) starts dancing on fragile and thin ice, everything starts to crack and tinkle. And that is the chief pleasure of the piece. The broad theatrical gestures, the expressionistic sets, the baffling details like a cuckoo clock with a severed birds head that pops out on the hour. I particularly like how the title-cards of the piece (and for that matter, the narration) seem to talk to the movie, rather than inform the viewer. Like much of the directors work, it is the folding in on itself of the film, (call it navel gazing if you will, but it is implied fondly) that makes it stand up. Unlike Maddin's recent films, which suffer slightly from auto-biography and self-deprecation, almost a need to engender audience goodwill, Careful boldly puts itself out there. Sink or Swim. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.