Movie Review: The Green Fog

The Green Fog **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson.

 

Every Guy Maddin movie is a like a trip inside of his very strange mind – a mind which sees connections in all sorts of them, where the ridiculous and sublime can co-exist. It is the mind of a movie obsessive – and Maddin’s films often use stylings of older films – silent films in particular – to tell deeply strange stories of deeply strange people. The Green Fog is a different sort of film for him in some ways – and yet it is very much a film that I can only imagine him making. The film is entirely found footage – all from movies and TV shows shot in San Francisco, for the most part with the dialogue cut out. Even when there is dialogue in a scene, Maddin and his co-directors (and editors) Evan and Galen Johnson – cur the dialogue – and just the dialogue out – meaning we see right up to the split second sound is going to come out, and right after it does. It is a very odd experience to watch. The structure of the movie is to retell Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo using only these clips of movies that are no Vertigo, but shot in the same city. If, like me, you’ve seen Vertigo more times than you can count – you can spot all the references, or at least most. You also may well be able to tell many of the movies being used here. And yet, it’s fascinating to see the film. Some will (and have) dismiss it as just a goof from a really talented, movie mad director like Maddin. The film, like everything Maddin does, has an undeniable, wicked sense of humor to it. But it’s more than that. It makes you look at Vertigo, one of the greatest and most talked about and written about films, in a different, new light.

 

It takes a little bit of time for you to kind of sink into a film like The Green Fog. It doesn’t operate like most films do, and even if (like me) you know the basic premise of the film before you watch it, you may not be prepared for just what Maddin is doing here – and the very meta way in which the film operates. Vertigo is, of course, a lot about watching – and so watching The Green Fog is about that as well. But now, we’re watching men watch women, and recall watching Stewart watching Novak in Vertigo, as we are watching these new people watch others. Maddin has some fun at times with this – so Rock Hudson watching a film reel as “evidence” becomes him watching a N’Sync video for instance with all of the seriousness you would expect when you watching something for evidence. Or when Michael Douglas from Streets of San Francisco watches Michael Douglas (naked) in Basic Instinct and tells him he’s looking good. Or when we get to the part of Vertigo when Stewart is basically in a catatonic state, and Maddin just plays minute upon minute of clips of Chuck Norris staring off into space. The Norris sequence is the best in the movie – in part because it is so funny, but also because it works. Drained of the sound, and the context of whatever the hell Norris is supposed to be doing in that movie, the clips work entirely in the context of what Maddin is doing.

 

The Green Fog is a massive feat of editing, and it is amazing how well it works. To be fair, it doesn’t really work as a film unto itself (at least I don’t think so – I wonder what someone who doesn’t know the concept of the movie, or have never seen Vertigo would make of this film – something I can never really know). It is an exciting film, a film that makes you reconsider the films it uses, the film it is referencing, and perhaps film itself – or at least the way we watch it.

Movie Review: The Forbidden Room

The Forbidden Room
Directed by: Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson.
Written by: Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson & Robert Kotyk and John Ashbery and Kim Morgan.
Starring: Roy Dupuis (Cesare), Clara Furey (Margot), Louis Negin (Marv / Smithy / Mars / Organizer / Mr. Lanyon), Udo Kier (Count Yugh / The Butler / The Dead Father / Guard / Pharmacist), Gregory Hlady (Jarvis / Dr. Deane / A Husband), Mathieu Amalric (Thadeusz M___ / Ostler), Noel Burton (Wolf / Pilot / The Captain), Geraldine Chaplin (The Master Passion / Nursemaid / Aunt Chance), Paul Ahmarani (Dr. Deng / Speedy), Caroline Dhavernas (Gong), Slimane Dazi (Baron Pappenheim), Maria de Medeiros (The Blind Mother / Clotilde), Charlotte Rampling (The Ostler's Mother), Karine Vanasse (Florence Labadie), Kim Morgan (Kim), Marie Brassard (Mysterious Necklace Woman).  

One viewing is probably not enough to fully appreciate – or hell, even fully understand, the latest film by Guy Maddin (co-directed by Evan Johnson) – The Forbidden Room. My initial reaction was that it wasn’t among Maddin’s very best films – preferring films like My Winnipeg or The Saddest Music in the World or The Heart of the World (one of the greatest 6 minute films ever made). But the more time passes, and the more I return to The Forbidden Room in my thoughts, the more I think that perhaps it does belong there. It certainly is the most Guy Maddin film that Guy Maddin has ever made – a crazy, visually spectacular journey into cinema’s lost past. To describe the plot of The Forbidden Room would be fool’s errand there’s just way too much of it – and to be honest, it all gets a little confusing at times. What Maddin and Johnson decided to do is research old, lost films and then “remake” them. Sometimes this is based on old reviews, sometimes little more than a poster or a tagline, that Maddin and Johnson spin off into some crazy narrative that lasts just a few minutes. But The Forbidden Room isn’t just a series of short films string together – that would be too simple. The narratives spin off into each other, with such a complicated nesting doll structure. Put it this way, if the nesting doll structure of The Grand Budapest Hotel had 4 different dolls – The Forbidden Room has many multiples of that dozen. Now you’re probably starting to see why I think I need to see the film again – at least once – to wholly appreciate it.

Maddin has assembled a huge, international cast of stars to be in the film. The first face we see is by veteran actor Louis Negin, who is hosting an instructional video on how to take a bath (can you believe that many people now take them every other day – some even every day). Negin will return in multiple roles throughout the film, as will many other members of the cast – just to make everything that much more confusing. What Maddin and Johnson essentially have done here is create a rabbit hole of narrative in which we continue to drop – so the water in the bathtub becomes an ocean, and there is a submarine in there, that cannot surface because it’s would explode if it did, but they’re running out of air, even when they factor in the air pockets from all the pancakes they eat (don’t ask), and their captain is missing, so they go looking for him, and instead find a lumberjack, and when they ask how he got there, he tells them a story about he and a group of his fellow lumberjacks trying to save the woman they all love, and how he had to pass a series of manly tests, but the woman also dreams of being an amnesiac and a singer, who will eventually sing a song about a character played by Udo Kier, who is obsessed with derrieres, and on and on and on and on.

The Forbidden Room is, in short, a pretty crazy film. It’s a film that I think you could probably see dozens of times, and still be surprised by what happens next, because there is so little rhyme or reason to it all. And also, because Maddin and Johnson have created such an immersive film – an impressive technical achievement, where they pretty much throw every technique – both old and new – at the screen to get every shot to look wholly unique and different.

Watching The Forbidden Room is, admittedly, a rather exhausting experience. It’s a film that’s impossible to keep up with, and yet one you want to dive back into when it’s all over. I’m still not convinced that it’s among Maddin’s truly great films – not like My Winnipeg, which had lots of digressions, much like this film, but one that Maddin seemed to have complete control over. This one spins wildly away from even Maddin. Which, of course, it’s one of its many, many charms. The Forbidden Room is far from perfect – but if it was perfect, it wouldn’t be half the film it now is.