Careful (1992)

Nobody makes films quite like Canadian Guy Maddin, who followed his odd debut, Tales From the Gimli Hospital, with the odder Archangel. This, his third film, is his oddest project yet. Set up a blatantly unreal Swiss mountain, Careful is about the town of Tolzbad, where everyone whispers and tiptoes lest a sudden sound bring down another catastrophic avalanche. All the repression is especially hard on the extended family of hero Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch). One brother goes mad through an incestuous fantasy about their mother (Gosia Dobrowolska) and another is stuck forgotten in the attic with only their father's blind ghost for company. Dobrowolska takes up with Count Knotgers (Paul Cox), who keeps his dead mother embalmed in a forbidden room, and the climax offers a duel, several exiles and the inevitable snowfall.

Combining the Suffering Peasant school of cinema with gothicisms that date back to early talkies horror films, Maddin's movies come from an odd alternate world where forgotten film techniques are still in use. His earlier films were more or less in black and white, but this uses colour tints that seem to have been hand-painted onto monochrome images. Inspired by those films shot in the late twenties that were made as silents but had talking sequences dubbed in, Maddin uses sombre narration and stilted dialogue to create an unnerving mood. There is a lot of weird humour among the gloom as the cast react to the parade of incest and death with the hair-tearing acting style of German Expressionism and hammer against the painted cardboard sets.

Not only has Maddin's reputation been expanding, so have his films. Gimli, still his most satisfying creation, was a tight 70 minutes, but this goes on for 100, allowing a few too many longeurs amid the hypnotically strange sequences. Maddin's earlier films are being shown at the ICA to accompany this; if you like one, you should see all three.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: The Good Times (issue unknown)

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