Guy Maddin’s hometown phantasmagoria, a documentary within inverted commas. By TIM WONG.

HILARIOUS! Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is an outrageous documentary tease, the Canadian’s most hysterical film to date. Ostensibly a paean to hometown roots, Maddin’s affection for ‘The Peg’ quickly turns south, and from within the frosty confines of a looping railcar, is compelled to reveal the truth about Canada’s ‘Gateway to the West’. A sleepy hollow as nocturnal purgatory, deviancy and absurdity lurks beneath the city’s wintry façade, with Guy, our tour guide, providing a lusty commentary on Winnipeg’s dark side: an unauthorized history, replete with shocking asides on brothels, hermaphrodites, man pageants, locker rooms, and other sexual mores. Amusing still, are Maddin’s autobiographical forays, where actors are cast in place of immediate family members (that’s Detour’s Ann Savage as Guy’s beauty shop mother), and long buried memories are exhumed and overanalyzed like a Ross McElwee film. Which is to say My Winnipeg is vintage Maddin, from the childhood anecdotes, to the insertion of ice hockey and ballet, to the lurid turn-of-the-century aesthetic: those grainy celluloid splashes, woozy cross-fades, brusque inter-titles, and extreme genital close-ups all contributing to the film’s drowsy, jokey malaise. Though angrily ensnared within a reoccurring dream, Maddin’s mock-umenting is not without fondness and good jest, and the director even turns fiercely protective at one point, lamenting the destruction of his beloved Winnipeg Arena, and the developers who’ve leveled the olde world charm. In a rare colour sequence, he films the demolition of the stadium, which refuses to topple even after the dynamite explodes – a sign, perhaps, that his beloved native city shares in his nostalgia, and has a life force all of its own.

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» Home Movie: My Winnipeg