Once again filmmaker/installation artist Guy Maddin (joined this time by Evan Johnson, making his debut) riffs on cinematic history, especially the silent era, presenting something that’s at once familiar and wholly original. The Canadian director takes the audience on a fevered trip through not only dreams and nightmares but fragments of dreams and nightmares - the ones where you’re both participant and voyeur. Imagine David Lynch in a particularly strange mood.
Frustrating for one expecting some – any – kind of narrative, The Forbidden Room is a series of loosely tied together shorts that tend to fold back on each other and all are served up with the usual Maddin style: cut up scenes, super 8 stock, title cards, front projections, deliberately ropey set backgrounds, crash zooms, odd close-ups, soft focus and chiaroscuro lighting.
Among the short stories is a jealous husband (Amalric) killing his butler (Kier), who then makes the journey from the afterlife to pass on his moustache to his son. There’s a melodrama where four sailors are trapped twenty fathoms down in a submarine with explosive jelly. There are jungle vampires and heroes who turn into not one but two blackened bananas. Sparks’ The Final Derriere soundtracks a man having a lobotomy to cure his obsession with ladies bums. It’s the woodsman, however, inexplicably turning up in said submarine, who somewhat knits the stories together as he searches for a kidnapped woman (Clara Furey). Oh, and there’s a Hyde-esque monster called Lug-Lug.
It’s all terribly confusing and to make sense of it all needs a lot of patience, an understanding of cinema history, Freudian theory, and more than a few viewings. But as the brain tries to untangle what’s unfolding – the natural instinct is to make sense of it all - there’s always some interesting visual on screen to help things along. The quirky sense of humour helps too – when it’s not trying to disturb and disorientate, The Forbidden Room offers up some funny scenarios (the trials of the woodsman involve bladder slapping, offal stacking and finger clicking) and lines: “Are you The Red Wolf… the leader of The Red Wolves?” (You had to be there).
Stories within stories, dreams within dreams, The Forbidden Room is pure lunacy. It’s too long and too weird for its own good but Maddin proves again what an original voice he possesses.
