Canadian auteur Guy Maddin has built his entire career around an obsession with silent-era and early-sound-era cinema. His homages go beyond the superficial gimmickry of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’s self-congratulatory, egregiously overrated film; Maddin digests the visual language and narrative tropes of the early film pioneers and works them into an unmistakable, wholly idiosyncratic sensibility. Some may file his work under the category of camp, but these films display a maniacal intelligence and nearly buckle under a surfeit of wild ideas that go far beyond mere ironic detachment.
The Forbidden Room, perhaps Maddin’s most ambitious film to date, is a post-modern Decameron—a fractal-like narrative concoction that aesthetically resembles a German Expressionist’s bad mushroom trip. Like Wojciech Has’s adaptation of Jan Potocki’s The Saragossa Manuscript, the film, co-directed by Evan Johnson, consists of a series of tangents and diversions layered one upon the other, to the point that the viewer loses track of each jumping-off point; dreams are nested within flashbacks nested within stories. At one point, we go into a story that appears on the front page of a character’s newspaper; at another, we briefly follow an incidental radio drama.
It would be absurd to attempt a summary of the film, but here’s an abbreviated list of some of the wonders it has to offer (all within the frame narrative of a submarine crew rapidly running out of oxygen with a precarious explosive jelly as their cargo): an instructional film on how to take a bath written by poet John Ashbery; a tribe of volcano-worshipping jungle-dwellers; a musical number entitled “The Final Derriere”; a bladder-slapping contest; vampiric creatures whose footsteps become louder as they get farther away; an elevator-apartment continually on the rise; a sequence depicting the dream of a dead man’s mustache. Yes, this film is completely insane, but it’s also gorgeous as well as maniacally funny.
One bit of extra-textual information that lends the film a sense of mythology: the individual segments in The Forbidden Room were inspired by various films made nearly a century ago that are now lost. Although nothing in the film indicates this, Maddin employs an array of visual techniques and digital effects to replicate the experience of watching a damaged, decaying celluloid print. These include the flecks of dirt, debris and other imperfections that pervade the frame, and the copious use of intertitles, which both provide narrative information and, in the tradition of early cinema, introduce new characters with the actors’ names below; and, speaking of which, Maddin has assembled one of his best-ever casts—most of whom play multiple roles—including Geraldine Chaplin, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Rampling and Udo Kier (who apparently hasn’t aged at all since the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder).
Despite what’s often considered a dichotomy between style and substance, in Maddin’s cinema, style is substance. This isn’t to discount the always entertaining lunacy of his ideas, which still sound amazing on paper. But Maddin’s films are extraordinary in large part because they couldn’t possibly exist in any other medium. The combination of practical and in-camera effects, retrograde storytelling (including a highly-mannered acting style) and avant-garde leanings is unique to Maddin’s individualistic approach, but also creates an effect that can only be achieved in the cinema. The Forbidden Room is a joy to get lost in. It’s a film brimming with visual inventiveness and absurd humor, narrative trapdoors and sly allusions. Nothing in 2015 is likelier to reinvigorate your faith in contemporary cinema.