CAREFUL
A film review by Michael Brooke
Copyright 1995 Michael Brooke
Directed by Guy Maddin. Written by George Toles and Guy Maddin. Canada, 1992, colour, 100 mins. Starring Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Paul Cox.
There are few film-makers whose work is instantly recognisable from a five-second clip taken out of context, but Canadian director Guy Maddin joined this select group with his very first feature, the black-and-white silent film TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988), a series of shaggy-dog stories told by hospital patients suffering from a strange disease that causes their skin to crack. ARCHANGEL (1990) was more ambitious, an epic set in the trenches of World War I, still in black-and-white, but this time with a post-synchronised soundtrack.
On the surface, CAREFUL (1992) is a tribute to German "mountain films" of the late 1920s. Future director Leni Riefenstahl started her career as an actress specialising in this genre (Hitler was a fan), in which strapping young lads and lasses go up Alpine peaks for thrilling adventures. Despite the surface pastiche (including a deliberately crackly soundtrack and colour that looks like hand-tinted monochrome), Maddin's film couldn't be more different from its sources. The opening narration sets the scene: the people of the Alpine village of Tolzbad show obsessive caution at all times, lest a sudden noise or movement cause avalanches to come and destroy them.
Needless to say, this repressed environment is a natural breeding ground for secret passions and obsessions. Johan neglects his studies at the famous Tolzbad Butler Gymnasium (Tolzbad's stifled atmosphere lends itself to servility) because of his incestuous obsession with his mother Zenaida. His fiancee Klara is similarly infatuated with her father, but he spurns her because of his lust for her sister Sieglinde. And Zenaida has a long-standing relationship with the mysterious Count Knotkers, who lives in the remote castle in the mountains, and who hires Grigorss, Johan's brother, as a butler. Watching over all this is Franz, the cobwebbed older brother of Johan and Grigorss, shut up in the attic because of the painful memories he evokes. And he is in turn regularly visited by the ghost of his father, a blind swan-feeder, who gives him premonitions of terrible things. But Franz is both mute and possibly insane, so the ghostly warnings go unheeded--and this melodramatic stew predictably leads to misunderstandings, duels and suicidal plunges galore.
What is fascinating about CAREFUL is the way that director (and co-writer, cinematographer, editor and designer) Maddin shows the same degree of obsession behind the camera that his characters show in front of it. Directors who love old films so much they want to imitate them are nothing new, but Maddin loves them so much he wants his films to look like old prints of old films (where most films deteriorate through repeated projection, CAREFUL improves!)--which is, after all, how Maddin (currently in his thirties) would have seen German mountain films in the first place. It's more than pastiche--you get the impression that Maddin genuinely believes that this is how films should be made, and that cinema hasn't really developed since the late 1920s.
He has a point--1920s directors like Abel Gance (NAPOLEON, LA ROUE) often showed a far greater visual sophistication than most of the film-makers who followed him, and none of Fritz Lang's American films ever recaptured the grandiose excesses of his German epics (DESTINY, SIEGFRIED, METROPOLIS). And although others have picked up on the artificial Expressionism pioneered by the makers of THE CABINET OF DR.CALIGARI, few before Maddin have embraced the techniques so wholeheartedly.
It's almost impossible to imagine him following compatriots David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan into the mainstream, as his work is so strange it makes the average David Lynch film look like 'Baywatch'. But one hopes that his enlightened backers will continue to fund his bizarre visions. CAREFUL is a giant step forward for Maddin in that it's very accessible and enormously entertaining (the earlier work was often too self-consciously precious, and the budgets painfully low). I for one shall treasure moments like the giant blue Alpenhorns serenading the summer, or Zenaida's instructions to "lower the sheepskins" in order to provide adequate soundproofing before dancing to scratchy violins, or Johan's scrupulous closing of the gate behind him before his fatal plunge, or Grigorss dripping candle-wax onto the face of the dead Countess Knotkers and trying to repair the damage - plus Maddin's frequent mock-Gothic intertitles solemnly announcing "Such is the moonrise in Tolzbad" after one of Franz' father's ghostly visitations. If Hollywood's recent output is just too brain-numbingly repetitive, give Maddin's films a try--at least you can guarantee that there's no-one else out there quite like him.
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