Customer Reviews

Guy Maddin Coll: Archangel [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
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Must-have for Maddin fans: His most beautiful and haunting feature and a short ("The Heart of the World") that's perhaps the best thing he's ever done. For the uninitiated, it would be better to start with the somewhat more lucid "Careful," which is more successful in making use of a great premise.

The (historically faithful) premise of "Archangel" is that the
citizens of this Russian town, cut off from the rest of Europe,
have not yet learned that WW I is over, so they continue fighting. Unfortunately, you might never know this from watching the film (I heard it from the horse's mouth). Connected with this theme of repetition and "forgetting" that something is over is the main plot of the amnesiac hero, a soldier who has forgotten that his beloved Iris has died, and thinks he has found her again in Veronika when he comes to the little town. Veronika is herself married to an amnesiac who repeatedly marries her, betrays her on their wedding night, then forgets he has done so.

"Archangel" is a sad example of a director with a fully developed visual sense and great ideas who hadn't yet learned how to coherently develop and present a narrative--and it would take a narrative master to lucidly present this massively complicated plot. Most successful is the absurd but moving subplot about the hero, John Boles's, usurpation of the father's role in the Archangel household that takes him in and the cowardly father's eventual redemption in his son's eyes. There are brilliant, beautiful surrealist moments like the famous "bunny snowfall" in the "sleepy trenches" and the war tableaux. Maddin maybe packs in *too many* dazzlingly original ideas for the viewer to absorb, but that makes for rewarding subsequent viewings. Frequent screenwriting collaborator George Toles is at his best here, drawing on amnesiac melodramas of World War II-era Hollywood. The Toles/Maddin trademark stilted, flowery dialogue also seems to fit perfectly with the haunting, disorienting themes and setting and adds to the eeriness. The soundtrack (scratches, stock war noises, and old '45s) is as gorgeous as the visuals. Not quite successful in what it sets out to achieve, but one-of-a-kind. It would take just as long to explain "Heart of the World," so I can't, except to say that Maddin has become such a coherent storyteller since "Archangel" that he can compress a (nearly) perfectly lucid narrative into a 6-minute film that's visually even more stunning and just as inventive as "Archangel."

Almost all of Guy Maddin's films in some way or another are salutes to the great experimenters of the European silent and early sound cinema: these two films, the full-length ARCHANGEL and the six-minute short THE HEART OF THE WORLD, are Maddin's salute to the great Soviet filmmakers of the Twenties, and have been eagerly anticipated by Maddin's cultish following. ARCHANGEL takes place in the Russian city of the same name in 1919, where (according to Maddin's scenario) the Great War has been continuing even while it has been over elsewhere for years. Warding off not only "the Hun" but crazed Bolsheviks, the inhabitants of Archangel all must go to the front to protect their homeland. The plot involves obsessive love among a group of amnesiacs in the besieged city, and prominently features Maddin's handsome and very funny favorite feature actor, Kyle McCullogh. maddin is perhaps too enemored of narrative for his own good, in that there are plot strands like crazy weaving back and forth, but the film is still very funny, even if not up to the standards of his next full-length work CAREFUL. (His funniest running gag is that many of the inhabitants of Archangel are dressed exactly like the medieval nuns, metroploitans, and empresses in Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE--even when they're fighting at the front.)

This video gets the full five stars, though, for its inclusion of THE HEART OF THE WORLD, probably Maddin's masterpeice to date. This award-winning silent short, commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival, directly parodies Soviet propagandistic experiemental film, and may be six of the funniest minutes ever captured on celluloid. The entire thing is so berserkly paced (in homage to Eisentstein's "lightning mixes") that you have to go back to replay it because you laugh so hard you miss key moments as they shoot by you at an insane clip.