CAREFUL (1992) ★
This was the first Maddin film to come on my radar—I goggled at a trailer for it all the way back in I guess 1992 (it was running in front of Todd Haynes' Poison, at Philadelphia's dearly departed Roxy Theater). In the intervening three and a half decades [!] I somehow got to most of the other Maddin films but only finally managed to catch this one this summer, thanks to a new 4K restoration which I caught at Chicago's Music Box.
Worth the wait—this is maybe his best? This is a tough claim for me to make, since Maddin's whole career is dotted with terrific films, and even the weaker ones are worth watching. But there's something special in this one (and it isn't just the deliriously unhinged use of color in a filmography that tends toward black-and-white, though that doesn't hurt). Rather, it feels like this is the one that is most successful at balancing the various contradictory impulses at play in his overall body of work: it confidently straddles the line between the auteur and the amateur, between the artificial and the absorbing; it has high camp attitude to spare but it also feels profoundly sincere; it's equal parts comic romp and affecting tragedy. It feels simultaneously like something that has existed forever and something that really doesn't belong in this universe at all.
None of this would work as well as it does if every person involved in this film hadn't committed to the bit. This includes not only the actors, who bring the perfect amount of wooden-faced authority to their delivery of the scripted dialogue (written by Maddin & Guy Toles), but also the costumers, the prop hands, the set decorators, the fucking... food stylists? They all came together heroically to produce something that looks and feels profoundly wrong at every given moment—and yet which also stands as a flawless realization of a singular cinematic vision.
jbushnell
