I have a weakness for Guy Maddin’s nonsense, so it’s no surprise I took to The Forbidden Room, which takes its mission from a Bible passage: “When they were filled, he said unto his disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” (John 6:12) Maddin has taken an array of ideas from old silent film fragments and layered them into a giant phyllo pastry of a film.
We start with an instructional video, “How to Take a Bath,” hosted by a man (Louis Negin, who also plays other roles in the film) in a loosely-worn bathrobe. A shot of the bathtub drain dissolves to one of a (special-effects) submarine near the ocean floor. Four submariners are sweating out a deep dilemma: A supply of explosives on board has thawed out and is only prevented from exploding by the ocean pressure. Their air supply is running out, though they can extend it a little by consuming flapjacks. When they see water leaking from a hatch, they open it, and out steps a woodsman. He doesn’t know how he got there; he had been walking through the forest with his fellow sapling jacks (i.e., apprentice lumberjacks) on the way to rescuing a kidnapped woman, who was being held in a cave by men who called themselves wolves. Eventually the woman escapes via a dream of her own, and there are other dreamers, including a mustache that dreams of its owner’s wife and child. And so on.
The movie works its way down through layers of story, and back up again, sometimes all the way to the bathing video, and back down to more stories, and near the end reaches the “book of climaxes,” which includes a plane dropping a bomb on a giant brain floating on the sea. There’s plenty of madness, and seduction, and injury, and general weirdness, and there are a few recognizable stars, such as Udo Kier, Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Caroline Dhavernas, and Charlotte Rampling. The film style imitates our experience of the old silents: lots of scratches and splices, pops on the soundtrack, tinted monochrome.
It’s thrilling and exhausting–Maddin takes special care “that nothing be lost.”
The Forbidden Room (reviews) (official site)
Directed by Guy Maddin
Co-directed by Evan Johnson
Written by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk, John Ashbery, and Kim Morgan
Running time: 119 minutes
DVD release date: March 8, 2016
* * *
The ABCs of Death has a lot of imagination. Twenty-six filmmakers were each given a letter of the alphabet and asked to produce a five-minute vignette involving death, built thematically around a word of their choosing that starts with the assigned letter. The resulting quickies are often comic, disturbing, or disgusting. A couple of them involve toilets; a few break the fourth wall. Sometimes there’s a twist; sometimes the story is straightforward; sometimes the story is incomprehensible. But the quality isn’t quite there overall; too often a bit will register as an interesting idea, insufficiently developed. (Maybe it’s the five-minute format.)
ABCs of Death 2 amps up the gore; gutsplatter seems to be the sole purpose of some segments. After a dozen or so grisly stories, this gets tiring. This one is more of a hard pass–though if you get a chance to see Bill Plympton’s segment, “H Is for Head Games,” take it.
Second-Chance Cinema 