Is Winnipeg for real?

About 20 years ago, when I reviewed Guy Maddin’s first feature, “Tales from the Gimli Hospital,” the only way I could think to describe it was “With flashbacks within dreams within flashbacks, it’s as though the western Canadian tourist bureau had hired Luis Bunuel in the early ’30s to make a promotional film about their industries and cultural heritage — and this is what he stuck them with.”

Who would have guessed that, after seven intervening features and more than a dozen shorts, someone actually would hire Maddin to make “My Winnipeg,” a documentary about his home town?
By now, anyone hiring him is likely to realize that, regardless of the specifics of the commission, anything he directs will be very much in keeping with his extremely idiosyncratic body of work. This “docu-fantasia” (as the director has called it) has substantial historical footage, and relates many true incidents from the city’s history — though it’s hard to be sure which ones are true and which are part of Maddin’s cinematic fever dream — but we’re definitely not talking about Ken Burns or even Michael Moore here.

The phrase “fever dream” is quite precisely what the movie’s framing device suggests. A rumpled, unshaven man named Guy Maddin (played by Darcy Fehr, reprising his role from the 2003 “Cowards Bend the Knee”) is on an outbound train, after years of unsuccessful attempts to leave the city of his birth. As the train chugs along hypnotically, he seems to be riding the edge of sleep, stuck in that uncomfortable twilight zone between dream and reality.

Even more hypnotically, Maddin — the real Maddin this time — narrates, weaving his family history, the city’s history, and God knows what else into a work as funny, and sometimes as creepy, as it is informative.

Maddin the narrator tells us that, in order to probe the past, he spent a month living in a recreation of his childhood environment. He sublet the house where he grew up and hired teenage actors to play his siblings. (Unfortunately, the woman he sublet it from decided not to leave; she sits placidly in the middle of the room as he makes his movie.) Only his mother, he says, will actually play herself.

Except that he’s lying ... or maybe telling us this as the character “Guy Maddin making a documentary” — located on a plane somewhere between his fictionalized family and the real world — rather than as “the real Guy Maddin making a movie about the character Guy Maddin making a documentary.” In fact, his mother is played by Ann Savage, the actress who achieved immortality more than 60 years ago as the vicious Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer’s ultra-low-budget “Detour.”

It’s unlikely that Maddin’s real mom would have been comfortable playing the domineering, manipulative oppressor of the script. The scenes between mother and daughter feel straight out of the Joan Crawford melodrama “Mildred Pierce,” but translated through Maddin’s bizarre imagination (for example, the daughter confesses to hitting a deer, which the mother hears as a confession to sleeping with random strangers).

Many of the least likely incidents in the movie turn out to be (as far as I can determine) real, like the story of 11 horses fleeing a burning stable and slipping into icy water that freezes around them; for the entire winter, their frozen heads stuck out of the ice “like eleven knights on a vast white chessboard.” All winter, the area was treated as a kind of park.

Long ago, I learned not to assume that even the weirdest elements in Maddin’s film are made up. The first time I interviewed him, during the release of “Careful,” I spoke of the goings-on in “Gimli Hospital” as fictional and the Dr. Seuss-like place names as made up. “Oh, no,” he told me. “It’s pretty much autobiographical. New Iceland is real .... I grew up in Winnipeg, but I really think of Gimli — which is a fishing village and resort where I spent the summers — as home. In 1874, after a volcanic eruption and an outbreak of swine blight or something, a couple thousand people emigrated. Half of them went to Brazil. 

“The rest, on the other hand, went to Manitoba, probably the coldest place on earth, arriving right at the start of winter. So, of course, they planted seeds in the soon-to-be-frozen ground. There was also a smallpox epidemic: the whole thing was a disaster.”

Some of the claims of “My Winnipeg” are easily verifiable — the razing of a landmark department store, the violent labor struggles, the great hockey players. (Some of the old players appear as themselves, as a sort of senior citizen/ghost team.) Yes, it’s considered the coldest major city in the world. Even a brief segment about the city being overrun by Nazis in 1942 is, in a sense, true.

At the far end of the credibility spectrum is the long-running TV show “LedgeMan,” in which (Maddin claims) his mother starred. Every episode was the same: The hero, driven toward suicide, would threaten to jump from a building ledge, until his usually hectoring mother would convince him to come back inside.

But what of Maddin’s claim that Winnipeggers have the highest rate of sleepwalking in the world? That everybody carries with them the keys to every home they’ve lived in? That a local law requires a resident to allow any former occupant to spend the night?

“My Winnipeg” could be seen as the third episode in Maddin’s imaginary autobiography: the protagonists of both “Cowards Bend the Knee” and last year’s “Brand Upon the Brain!” are named Guy Maddin, and, in “Cowards,” many of the details about his family are true.

It might sound horribly self-centered to turn a “documentary” about a city into a history of your own emotional development, but the more one studies this body of   work, the more it makes sense. Maddin is himself a product of Winnipeg; his artistic personality seems so bound up with his environment that his “personal” Winnipeg tells us a lot about the “objective” Winnipeg ... if such a thing really exists.

If the outrageous events in earlier Maddin films were actually versions of true events, then perhaps Maddin isn’t so much creating a surrealist’s version of the city; maybe the city simply is surreal, and it consequently created the surrealist filmmaker. That might sound like sophistry, but consider a city in which the heads of frozen horses — their faces twisted from their final agonies — become the center of a sort of picnic park for the residents. If that can’t be called surreal, I don’t know what can.