The vocabulary plumbed in his first films derives mostly from early British and Soviet films (put through a postmod blender, of course), but Careful, Maddin's first color film, has its roots in the German, Arnold Franck-Leni Reifenstahl "mountain" films of the '20s, scrambled with Johanna Spyri, Wagnerian romance, and Robert Walser's Jacob von Gunten, whipped into a Freudian whirlpool. The film opens with a portrait of Tolzbad, an Alpine village (mustered out of papier-mache, forced perspective, lens fog and blinding light in a Canadian warehouse) where the slightest sound can inspire an avalanche. Even the animals' vocal cords are cut; in one scene we glimpse a dog soundlessly barking. The narrator warns the denizens ("Careful! Careful!") that every noise, as well as every impulse to behave improprietously, must be hushed. "You'd better put your name on your new toothbrush," a mother warns early on, "before an accident happens." Tolzbad reveals itself, not surprisingly, as a hotbed of repressed impulses, and its Candyland cheeriness is soon tainted by jealousy, incest, suicide and murder.
It's a beautifully concise concept the floridly colored Expressionist sets, fake shadows, chintzy high-school-play decor and obvious miniatures invoke a sealed world where real human dramas are to be playacted out as if by toy soldiers in a treehouse. Orson Welles once called a movie set the biggest train set a kid ever had, and Maddin takes him at his word; Careful is nothing if not a masterpiece of ersatz style and fully imagined writing over budgetary limitations. It's also more viewer-friendly than the earlier movies, the narrative lines drawn thickly along clear currents of Oedipal angst. Two Tolzbad brothers, Grigorss (Maddin regular Kyle McCulloch) and Johann (Brent Neale), live with their voluptuous mother (Gosia Dobrowolska) and attend the Tolzbad Butler Gymnasium in hopes of someday being hired by the local Count as a manservant. Soon to be married to Klara (Sarah Neville), for whom Grigorss also pines, Johann becomes dreamily obsessed with his own mother (eventually drugging her and fondling her in her sleep) and is driven to paroxysms of suicidal, self-mutilating guilt. Klara has her own closeted skeletons, too, driven by a jealous hankering for her incestuous father, which is eventually confessed to Grigorss in her lofty mountain hiding place between oxygen-depleted yawns. There's even a mute and attic-secreted third brother, Franz (Vince Rimmer), who alone is visited, Hamlet-like by the ghost of the family's blind father (the ghost is blind, too) warning of the calamities to come. The neurotic vectors cross and criss-cross, and Careful becomes that rare thing, a whimsical tragedy.
Of course, the whim is Maddin's, and like all of his films Careful is constructed around its own apparent dissolution. For movieheads, the textual chinks are the big laugh-getters; no other filmmaker has gotten so much from so little. It's an irony surely not lost on Maddin that the intentional technical crudity of his films seems more assured and canny than the polish of contemporary industry Edsels costing 60 times the cash. With its use of mandarin color-tinting, waxen performances (Maddin is as stylized with his actors as Kubrick), and Maddin's trademarked purplish dialogue ("You're as fresh and sound as a rose," Johann tells Klara early on), Careful is an impish movie-movie no less hilarious and gorgeous for its often astounding technical somersaults and authorial jerryrigging.
And the irony continues: the new "remastered and repressed" DVD edition from Zeitgeist, as splendid as it is, can furrow the brow certainly, in one sense, any age, fading or happenstance that might scar a Maddin film further only continues his aesthetic. (The filmmakers would of course argue not; the bell jar is closed and airtight and thus it should remain.) At any rate, the disc's extras are notable: a feature documentary about the doomed production of Maddin's next film, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a new Maddin commentary (yet another layer of impish disingenuousness, from a director who never tells the truth), and, best of all, the director's sublime and startling BBC-commissioned five-minute dream-short on the art of Odilon Redon, titled Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1995).
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by Michael Atkinson
