movie reviews
Brand Upon the Brain
Movies are the ultimate extension of dreams. In the short time from the title to the credits, a movie can take the viewer into an all-enveloping realm of the unknown. Brand Upon the Brain is Canadian director Guy Maddin’s hallucinatory reimagination of his own childhood. It is a dreamworld that blurs the edges between the real and the imaginary while pulling us down a rabbit hole into the wonderfully strange world brewing in Maddin’s head.
Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs) returns to an abandoned Canadian island to fulfill his mother’s dying wish to repaint a lighthouse, which was home to his family and the orphanage they ran. With each brushstroke, Maddin falls into his recollection of growing up in the lighthouse with his flighty sister, workaholic father, and totalitarian mother. In his memory, the young Maddin (Sullivan Brown) discovers a diabolical plight befalling the orphans with whom he shares the lighthouse, and tries to come to terms with the bizarre reality he has found.
Like the brushstrokes the fictional Maddin makes on the lighthouse, the real Maddin created a film that is painterly and undeniably artful. Shot in the black and white style of silent films and the surreal environments of the German expressionist era, Brand breaks the paradigms of modern film. Complete with title cards, chapters, and jarring edits, Maddin pays homage to the simplicity of early film. Like Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Salvador Dali’s films, the mind is left to decide what lies in the shadow-saturated images.
But the film does not only rely on its darkly beautiful style. The narrative also opens like a black rose, slowly revealing the dark secrets hiding in Maddin’s lighthouse. Crouching in the haze of Maddin’s memory lies forbidden love, ravenous greed, and fantastical nightmares. He weaves the narrative like sci-fi and cult films: carefully juxtaposing the shocking with the mesmerizing. The real pleasure is watching the characters react to the outlandish environments and people that they encounter. There is a gender-bending sleuth, an orphan insurrection, and even an underground vampiric plot. And when things become too intense, the young Maddin almost faints, allowing the viewers to take a breath with him.
Maddin also released the film in a series of live events, complete with a live orchestra and Foley artists—who put sound to each footstep and every door slam—as well a esteemed cadre of celebrity narrators including Isabella Rossellini and Crispin Glover. The Criterion DVD release allows the viewer to choose from the many actors to narrate Maddin’s imaginative fairy tale. The orchestral score also soaks this postmodern fable in an eerie Tom Waits-in-Eastern-Europe flavor. Also included on the beautifully produced DVD are Maddin’s shorts—shot exclusively for this release—about the artists who brought these live shows to life.
Brand is not an easy film for the uninitiated. But it is a film that challenges expectation, rewards patience, and delivers an undeniably unique love letter to emotions stirred by cinematic history.
—Drew Tewksbury
09.04.08
Related posts:
Discussion
No comments for “Brand Upon the Brain”
Post a comment