For anyone wishing to check out the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, his latest DVD is a good introduction. It’s only an hour long, broken down into ten digestible, titled chapters, packed with all of his quirky trademarks. With his penchant for the look of early European silent films, Maddin’s melodramatic narratives are distinctly surreal. The acting and dialogue are somewhere between overwrought and stilted. The sets are typically just above the believability of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. And Maddin uses the film itself as a DJ scratches vinyl. You never forget you’re watching an invented reality, as focus goes in and out, and moments in time are looped back and forth or frozen to highlight the deeper meanings in gestures. Instead of sampling vintage material, Maddin creates his own dusty nostalgia, borrowing elements from several eras and places. The characters in Maddin’s stories always suffer/enjoy a curious sexual stigma, from painful longing to adultery and incest. Here he sets up a comically complex love triangle that quickly evolves into some crazy new unnamed shapes. Nothing is quite what it seems on the surface. The film is designed as a series of peephole views, but the opening scene is seen through a microscope rather than a keyhole, revealing a sperm sample made up of tiny hockey players. A hairdresser’s salon doubles as a bordello and triples as an abortion clinic. A surgeon pretends to replace a character’s hands with those of his girlfriend’s dead father, leading the patient to think that his murderous actions are beyond his control. People spy on each other spying on themselves through a maze of mirrors and reflective scissor blades. A man leaves his fiancée while she’s on the operating table for a nurse, only to then leave the nurse to fight his father over the now-dead girlfriend’s ghost. It’s a loopy whirlwind of bizarre entanglements that seems even weirder when you learn that it’s Maddin’s pseudo-autobiography. I won’t pretend that it makes for a coherent conclusion, but it definitely sweeps you up in a soap opera of obsession and human frailty.

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