Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 2015, evan johnson, guy maddin, the forbidden room
Director(s): Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson
The strapping woodsman hero that appears often in The Forbidden Room is named Cesare (Roy Dupuis), beckoning one to recall the somnambulist of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Indeed, to watch a film by Guy Maddin is to feel as though one is sleepwalking. Their free associative form–connecting fragments together with Freudian dream logic–lulls one into a sort of spell, as if the film itself was a living entity that was interacting directly with the viewer’s mind. For Maddin’s latest effort, he bases a series of stories on the titles of forgotten films, serving as a resurrection of collected memories lost to time. These episodes, interwoven within one another in a structure that employs flashbacks upon flashbacks, feel like single episodes of lost serials, with strange occurrences such as a “squid thief” appearing out-of-context and left for the audience to parse through. Maddin’s great genius is in relating the styles of silent European cinema to the processes of the mind–in My Winnipeg, he used archaic filmic techniques like irises and intertitles as a means of evoking memories and dreams. The Forbidden Room might just be his most chaotic film in that it utilizes early film techniques as a means of reflecting on the shared forgotten tales of a century ago. Like Cesare’s beloved Margot (Clara Furey), watching the film evokes the feeling of amnesia, with one’s very participation in the film seeming to come and go, allowing thoughts to drift back and forth as story threads are offered and then promptly taken away. If it isn’t as touchingly personal as My Winnipeg, nor does it have the same sense of focused narrative momentum as Brand Upon the Brain!, The Forbidden Room is perhaps Maddin’s magnum opus, a collection of the director’s obsessions laid out in the most uncompromising use of his form to date.
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