Kino Lorber
Images explode with color.
Sailors trapped in a submarine are staying alive due to the oxygen trapped in the bubbles in their flapjacks. When they’re interrupted by a woodsman, Cesare (Roy Dupuis), who somehow enters the submerged vessel, an already absurd scenario transforms into a series of nested flashbacks and fever dreams. That’s just a taste of the madness in The Forbidden Room, the newest film by Canadian provocateur Guy Maddin.
The dense imagery in The Forbidden Room — which screens once at the UW Cinematheque on Saturday, Dec. 12, at 7 p.m. — paces your mind at a sprint, but its two-hour running time is closer to a 10K run. The film, a collaboration between Maddin and Evan Johnson, demands that you stay in the moment and savor its wide-ranging visuals and textures. It is not difficult to understand what is going on at any given moment, unless you try to remember how it relates to what has happened or try to anticipate whether you’ll need to remember it.
At some point we’re in the middle of a music video for a song about a man who has parts of his brain removed to relieve his obsession with women’s derrieres. The man: go-to Euro-creep Udo Kier (who has worked with Lars von Trier, Dario Argento and even Michael Bay). The internal personification of his desire: a whip-wielding Geraldine Chaplin. Other recognizable faces later woven into the film’s tapestry include Mathieu Amalric and Charlotte Rampling, right alongside Maddin’s stock players like Louis Negin, who pops up in multiple roles.
During his 2014 visit to Madison, Maddin screened his best-known work, the semi-documentary My Winnipeg. Even that more accessible work featured Maddin’s trademarks: stylized performances, layered images, textured cinematography and film-historical references, especially to silent cinema. Now Maddin and Johnson tip their hat to two very different underground filmmakers who emerged in the 1960s: George Kuchar and Jack Smith, the latter with Maddin’s shared affinity for exotic melodramatic potboilers from the 1940s. John Waters, a big Kuchar and Smith fan, just named The Forbidden Room his third-favorite film of 2015 in Artforum.
The Kuchar-influenced performances are less about realism and more about making something vivid and memorable (check out the portrait documentary It Came From Kuchar!). When captive Margot (Clara Furey) dreams about writhing on the floor during a cabaret performance, Furey gives the moment everything she’s got. The cinematographic fireworks distract from the small, very simple sets made to seem large through rear-projection, selective lighting and other theatrical trickery.
Images explode with color, and the superimpositions seem to ooze through each other. A particularly gorgeous sequence mimics the color palette of red and green Technicolor from the 1920s. It’s a shame that we don’t always have time to appreciate the beauty of a segment before we’re jarred into a new visual scheme.
As Maddin tells viewers in his director’s statement for The Forbidden Room: “Stay safe and enjoy!” The warning is for those inclined to walk out of anything edgier than the other Room currently in theaters. The invitation is for those of us ready to groove on this richly textured visual experience.
