[critical] Winnipeg My Love

A tribute sweet and bitter at the birthplace of Guy Maddin, Canada. City of superlatives, according to the director : the coldest in the world, the smallest park in the world, the city of the sleep-walker, magnétiseurs and sessions of spiritism, a sleepy town inhabited by the spirits. It is as well as a narrator tired describes the city in the first person, looking at her scroll behind the window of a train. Plunging his gaze into the landscape faded, he thinks back to his childhood, to the history and topography of his city.

Author’s Note

[rating:9/10]

• Release Date : October 21, 2009

• Directed by Guy Maddin

• Film canadian

• With Ann Savage, Darcy Fehr, Louis Negin

• Duration : 1h19min

• Trailer :

‘AND IF…’ Guy Maddin had not been winnipeggers, would he have been able to make this long film (I will not use the term docu-fiction, a term which I cringe the mane as a brush couch grass on the body of a Twingo) ? NO !

At any lord, all honor, Winnipeg : the capital of Manitoba, in the province of Canada, with over 630,000 inhabitants, is considered the ‘capital of the world grain’, a city swept up by incessant winds, deemed the coldest in the world. For historians, it is still the homeland of Louis Riel, the métis who fought the canadian government to uphold the rights of indigenous peoples (Jesuit Joe – the movie – tells the story, through the voice of his vulture, who was this mysterious and almost mystical !). For me to be me-even stopped for a day during a journey to the Rocky mountains, I remember this town in a metropolitan like a pound cake…pass through Winnipeg, it is crossing a desert of concrete, cars, and houses who sometimes turn their backs, a conglomerate human that you leave an impression somnambulique, blank of all memories once the foam of the wind past…the stranger remains a stranger to Winnipeg !

Admirer of Luis Buñuel, the director of the manitoba we book such a palimpsest postmodern, a personal story, a journey of life in a geographical framework specific, the urban and the strange, between documentary and fiction, under the battering of an iconography derived from his drawer funds family, the native of Winnipeg, which happe of its goal 8-millimeter flakes of snow twirling at the discretion of the lanes and alleys of the city. The choice of black and white is a good idea, to the image of the filmmaker, independent in his thinking, liberal in its staging, devoid of the codes of puritanism film. The photography grainy returns us full in the face of the universe, a microcosm with all its asperities ; why separate the wheat from the chaff ?

Through an aesthetic that pays a vibrant tribute to the form of the mute, the film slave of the thirties, and more of the most beautiful works of Dreyer, Guy Maddin stops at no sacrifice in order to transcend this time line to the human scale – the train, the leitmotif of this tempus fugit. This fragmentation of individual memory is not an artifice of gender, on the contrary, it generates this power of memory which brought back our memories to our childhood, a true process of exhumation of our inner self, where the common areas – skating rink, supermarket, family living room, the park – places of survival. Guy Maddin wants to remain the witness of his own past, of those local legends that have fascinated and shaped the legendary Fred Dunsmore and her team-mates of the Maroons – through figures of paternal and fraternal parties too early. The cruelty does not escape not more to Guy Maddin, when under the weight of horses in a trance, the frozen lake breaks up and locks up to the neckline. This scene of ‘still life’ becomes an attraction for young winnipeggers, the time of the winter. The Man acquires the power to touch the spectrum of the tip of the finger !

‘Winnipeg my Love’ portrays the fate of a changing city, since its foundation, working up to its subversion in the straitjacket of the consumer, with the focal point of this fork both geographical and metaphysical rivers confluent – the Red and the Assiniboine – fork that acts as the anchor point between the generations who pass through the test of time. The pubic symbolizes the carnal relationship between Guy Maddin with his city, with this earth that was born of the strains of the Ojibwa whose spirit still haunts the vast prairies. The dreamlike atmosphere of this allegory shows how the film touches the deepest of the being, and I promise to one day return to Winnipeg, put this time my chest, and to inhale these flakes of snow that pass by the force of the wind all the obstacles of life…