THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015) 118m *** ½ Blu-ray released March 8, 2016)
Eccentric experimental Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin has made no secret of his admiration for silent cinema, part-talkies, and early talkies. The grainy look of poorly-preserved old film that just barely managed to survive and the graceful and larger-than-life movements of actors in silent films have long been part of his unique style Maddin’s latest effort, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015), like many of his works, incorporates his love of early cinema with his peculiar, darkly satiric, and downright weird creativity. It also shows his fascination with films that are totally lost or survive only in tattered fragments. This time he applies his comically absurdist sense of the surreal upon an adventure-mystery plot of men trapped in a submarine, which serves as a framework for several unrelated plots as the men relate various strange stories of their own experiences and/or dreams and/or fears while trying to locate their elusive captain. And framing this driving plot is a droll monologue about how to take a bath, written by no less than the poet John Ashbery, inspired by a lost film by cult exploitation director Dwain Esper. The experimental, avant-garde aesthetic in storytelling is a challenge for unprepared viewers, but classic movie buffs who appreciate silents and early talkies should find THE FORBIDDEN ROOM a visual treat. For those who missed its festival screenings or very limited theatrical release last year, Kino is releasing it to Blu-ray next week.
Shot mostly in Paris and Montreal in front of live audiences, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is really a collection of several short films. All are inspired by and/or remakes in abridged form of a wide range of genre films from around the world that are intermingled together in an unusual concentric pattern (not unlike the structure of Michael Curtiz’s PASSAGE TO MARSEILLES). Many are silent, some are sound, some “part-talkie,” with Maddin cutting between different stories and back to the framing story. The commentary reveals that what may appear to be cross-cutting is actually a deliberately organized nesting structure of three separate acts containing stories within stories within stories, rather than each story building to a climax simultaneously. The effect is like a half-insane collision of David Lynch, Monty Python, and Nobuhiko Obayashi, especially the latter’s amazingly delirious “Hausu” (1977), filtered and enhanced through Maddin’s own oddball vision. At 119 minutes, “The Forbidden Room” sometimes drags in its celebration of over-the-top imagery and obscure in-jokes, but it is always intriguing. During and shortly after production of “The Forbidden Room,” Maddin shot numerous additional recreations of lost films for a series called “Seances.” This is expected to be available on line later this year in an interactive project from the National Film Board of Canada.
Kino’s Blu-ray of THE FORBIDDEN ROOM admirably reproduces Maddin’s intentionally “distressed” film look, which moves from grainy black and white to various styles of color, including the now-obsolete two-color Technicolor and Cinecolor used in the 1920s and 30s. Frequent jumps in action and changes of picture sharpness and title fonts effectively simulate the reconstruction of lost films from assorted surviving fragments in various stages of decay. In other words, what you see on the screen looks exactly the way Madden intended and took great pains to achieve digitally. Likewise the sound cannot be judged by 21st-century standards as it is an homage to the early days of movies, switching from well-recorded musical accompaniment over silent-movie sections with intertitles to part-talkie or all-talkie segments that have primitive-sounding scratchy audio. Bonus features include an illustrated booklet with two very interesting essays, including one by Maddin himself describing vividly how he shot 69½ short films for the “Seances” project in 70 days during a transcontinental journey aboard a prison train! On the disc there’s an enjoyable audio commentary by Maddin with co-director/co-writer (and former student) Evan Johnson, as well as a couple of abstract experimental shorts, and two trailers.
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM on Blu-ray --
Movie: A-
Video: A
Audio: A
Extras: B