A Pretentious Welcome to Maddin's Winnipeg

Winnipeg. The word likely elicits no reaction from the average American: perhaps a head tilt or a slight look of confusion. What reason would we have to go to Winnipeg—much less think of it? But for Guy Maddin, director of the new film My Winnipeg, which opens this Friday, Winnipeg is all.

It is his home, inseparable from his family and his mother. It is his lifeblood, but also his tormentor. My Winnipeg documents Maddin’s troubled relationship with that city, the coldest city in North America. Maddin tries to escape the city where he has lived his entire life, but he finds himself inextricably tied to it. He cannot escape without revisiting the scenes of his youth and reexamining what it is that binds him so strongly to Winnipeg.

To fans of Maddin—The New York Times refers to him as a visionary—the fact that he is delusional is appealing, even inspiring. But speaking to the director in a recent interview, I found the artist bizarre and self-inflated. That’s not to say he isn’t talented. My Winnipeg boasts a clear, directed cinematic vision, conjuring a real-life city into something closer to a surrealist landscape.

My Winnipeg is presented in a documentary style, yet Maddin wondered aloud to me why people asked him about the validity of the film’s contents, saying that no one ever wonders about the truth of the contents of literature. After this speech, though, he told me, “For the record, everything in the film is true.”

Everything, he claimed, including the existence of a television show, “Ledgeman,” created by and starring his mother. It played on Canadian public access for 49 years, he told me. Each episode featured a man standing on a window ledge, threatening to jump. At the last, crucial moment, Maddin’s mother would stick her head out the window and explain why that was not the solution, why life was worth living. Over its intimidating tenure on television, Ledgeman featured many guest stars, Mr. Maddin said. The hockey coach whose team had just lost a big game would stand on the ledge when he was passing through town, threatening to end it all. “Don’t worry!” Mrs. Maddin would exclaim. “You’ll win tomorrow. Don’t jump.”

Apparently the gifted director took me for what I am: quite gullible. Busy trying to transcribe his words, I didn’t pause to think about the validity of his statement until I left the interview room at the IFC headquarters. The fact that any one show would have spent 49 years on television aside, I doubted that a show so blatantly about suicide could be shown on any public channel. “Wow,” I had remarked during the interview, “nothing like that would ever be shown on American television. It must be a Canadian thing.” Seeing as a Google search for “Ledgeman” yields nothing not attached to My Winnipeg, it seems that it isn’t a Canadian anomaly either.

The little fibs Maddin told me didn’t bother me so much after I made peace with having been taken for a fool—they added to the false air of authenticity of the film itself. It is impossible to tell truth from falsehood, and irrelevant to even try to do so. The lies and exaggerations—that by law, Winnipeg residents are allowed to carry all the keys to their old residences and the current inhabitants must let them in should they wander there in the middle of the night, that Winnipeg has a rate of sleepwalking 10 times higher than the national average, and that Maddin himself has been known to sleep-drive to his cottage—give one pause, for they remain in the sketchy gray area between truth and invention. As Maddin said, it does not matter whether the contents of the film are true, which is why it struck me as so strange that he insisted upon their validity.

The press release for My Winnipeg describes it as a “deranged post-Freudian proletarian fantasy.” Each of these elements clearly shows itself in the film, but the pretension of that statement speaks for itself. My Winnipeg is difficult and grating to watch, pompous and self-important to a fault. Still, I found myself strangely drawn to the vision of his hometown that Maddin had composed and, at the film’s conclusion, woke up as if I, too, had been sleepwalking through the last 80 minutes.