When called to look back on our childhoods, most of us do so with a mix of melodrama, mirth and out-and-out horror.
Well, with Brand Upon the Brain! filmmaker Guy Maddin proves he's just like the rest of us.
And then some.
The film -- his apparently autobiographical new effort -- is ostensibly a silent that already has toured the festival circuit with a live orchestra and celebrity narrators. It is being touted by the director as 100% emotionally accurate, which if nothing else should make for some interesting discussions at the next Maddin family reunion.
Shot in grainy black-and-white, and employing Maddin's trademark grab-bag of vintage-looking visual tricks, the film concerns itself with a house painter named Guy Maddin, whose mother summons him back to the lighthouse where he was raised, to literally whitewash the trauma of his childhood with two coats of fresh paint.
Once there, he finds himself overcome by memories, most of them having to do with his sexually adventurous older sister, his tyrannical and overbearing mother, and a shady father figure who spends most of his time in the laboratory, engaged in a mad-scientist scheme that provides the film with its most grotesque, Grand Guignol-inspired set pieces.
Maddin's parents run an orphanage, you see, so when Mom isn't forcing her forlorn-looking charges to sweep up the decrepit lighthouse that doubles as their home, she's using a bizarre-looking searchlight to keep tabs on her henpecked kids (Maya Lawson, who looks like she stepped directly out of the 1920s, plays Sis, and Sullivan Brown plays the younger Maddin).
Needless to say, she has her work cut out for her, especially when Wendy Hale (Katherine E. Scarhon) -- one half of a famed teen detective team -- arrives on the island to figure out why all the orphans have sinister scars on the backs of their necks.
The androgynous young sleuth sets in motion a series of sexual awakenings in both Maddin and his sister, made even more confusing when she disguises herself as her twin brother, Chance.
The plot is rife with Oedipal imagery, Freudian subtext, and nods to both the German horror canon and avant-garde expressionism -- and it unfolds at a languid pace. But as usual, Maddin's visual flourishes set it apart from anything you're likely to have seen before.
Shooting for the first time in Seattle, instead of his native Winnipeg, Maddin contrasts the actions of his uniformly game cast with scratched-up film stock, over-enthusiastic intertitles, and jerky jump cuts that serve to heighten the sense of memories rising to the murky surface.
Narration is provided by Maddin's frequent collaborator Isabella Rossellini, whose thick accent and impassioned enunciation make her a perfect match for the surreal images unspooling onscreen.
Now, the fact that Maddin regards his formative years as a hotbed of sexual anxiety and parental betrayal should come as no surprise, really -- since most of us could probably come up with similarly horrific riffs on the same theme.
What's far more impressive is how he infuses his mythology with such lyricism and sensuality, ushering the art-form of autobiography into a whole new realm.
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