Waking dream

The Forbidden Room is another rapturously surreal fever dream created by Guy Maddin, the wild man/movie magician from Manitoba. It’s the first Maddin feature to reach Chico since, if memory serves, The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and on the basis of first look, I’d say it’s one of his best.

Like the films on which his reputation was first built (Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary), the new film resists easy categorization. There is no clear-cut storyline apart from the almost symphonic drift among a multitude of loosely interrelated story fragments and bizarre characters. Dream logic (and illogic) prevails within the dark-humored swirl of twisted folk myth and silent movie-era pastiche.

Maddin’s gift for mimicking and repurposing outmoded movie styles and genres is on full display here, and the fictive ingredients of cracked melodrama and convulsive folklore combine with the deliberately rough-edged visual style to provoke some startling emotional resonances. The obvious element of parody is amusing enough, but the film’s scrambled approach to all that pushes for something deeper and darker—and more adventurously poetic.

The film opens with bits of “How to Take a Bath,” a rowdy parody of mid-century instructional films, and then plunges into the drama of men stranded in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean. The latter has the aura of a lurid and pretentious B-movie of the early 1930s, and when the sub’s captain tells the men that the air holes in their pancakes will supplement their oxygen supply, the uproarious lunacy prized by Maddin comes more fully into view.

The still-stranded submarine crew (which also gets an underwater visit from a mysterious “woodsman”) disappears from the film, then reappears later on. In the meantime, we get more stories and dreams. A doctor is captured by women wearing skeleton suits and forced to wear a leotard. Another character willingly submits to a lobotomy in order to cure his “butt-pinching habit.” A woman meets her inner child and the results are fatal. Another physician gets into a bidding war with his own double—over a work of art at the fabled “Night Auction.”

Another episode involves a character called Lug-Lug, who is “hideous impulse incarnate.” We also get an account of “the dream of a dead man’s mustache hairs.” Another character ties stones to his feet to keep from running too fast when chasing buffalo. There’s also a brief discourse on Janus, “the god who presides over thresholds”: “When Auspices beckon, it is Janus we praise.”

There’s a large international cast on hand, including some big names from Europe, and some of them play multiple roles. Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros and Jacques Nolot have two roles apiece, and Geraldine Chaplin has three, including the archetypal Master Passion. The sepulchral Udo Kier has five, including the lobotomized butt-pincher. My personal favorite here is Louis Negin, who also has five roles, including the shabby looking hedonist who narrates “How to Take a Bath” in his bathrobe.

Maddin’s marathon reveries reach their conclusion with “The Book of Climaxes,” a montage/anthology of final moments in cliffhanger/suspense situations. Maybe The Forbidden Room should have ended sooner than it does, but for me it’s the kind of movie that goes on playing in your head long after the lights have come up. I’m already looking forward to seeing it again.