Reel Politique: News, Local Guy Maddin Event
One of the most delightful, curious, and original nights at the movies occurred last night (Saturday, October 13th) at the Cinema 21. That’s when, as part of the Gay and Lesbian film festival, Brand Upon the Brain! (the latest work by Winnipeg-based director Guy Maddin) screened to a packed house. BUTB is a silent film, but it is probably the noisiest silent film ever made. It comes with a live narrator (called The Interlocutor, last night played by actress Karen Black), a live orchestra performing the musical score (composed by Jason Staczek and conducted by David Hattner), a live foley ensemble, and a person advertised as a castrato, a tuxedo-garbed man who sits immobile in a cushioned chair to the right of the screen until summoned to sing two arias late in the movie. A film at the Cinema 21 has never sounded so good.
BUTB is a fantasia that blends elements of Shakespearian gender confusion with children’s detective novels and the silent serials of Louis Feuillade. It’s a typical Maddin cocktail of incest, cannibalism, fetishism, lesbianism, and homosexuality. The comical yet serious narrative finds an adult named Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) on an island in the present searching for his past. The bulk of the film recounts an episode in which his mother (Gretchen Krich), who runs an orphanage in a lighthouse, comes in conflict with Maddin’s sister (Maya Lawson), who in turn is engaged in a romance with boy detective Chance Hale, who is really Chance’s sister, Wendy (Katherine E. Scharhon) in disguise. Eventually, sis stages a coup and banishes her and her and Guy’s father (Todd Moore), a scientist extracting brain juice from all the children to rejuvenate his aged wife. Back in the present, the adult Guy is almost reconciled with the ghost of his mother, but is distracted from saying a final “I love you” to her by the reappearance of Wendy’s spirit. The film is presented in Maddin’s usual pitch of jittery, barely controlled hysteria, somnambulism, and swooning the grace notes. In fact, young Guy faints about three times in the course of the story. ButB was shot in Seattle in early 2005 and backed by the Seattle-based The Film Company as the non-profit’s second foray into moviemaking.
Saturday’s performance was the third and final one over the course of two days, and the event was no doubt the highlight of the festival, if not movie-going in Portland this year. Karen Black did an amusing as the guest interlocutor. Others in different cities have included Crispin Glover and Laurie Anderson, and different interlocutors apparently can dramatically shift the tone of the work.
The person I was most curious about was the castrato, billed as Dov Houle, and introduced as Guy Maddin’s childhood friend. When I asked the conductor about him, Mr. Hattner let it be known that Dov Houle was the man’s stage name, and Maestro’s attempt to suppress laughter hinted to me that Mr. Houle was a participant in some kind of elaborate joke or ruse on the part of the always-playful Maddin. I tracked down Mr. Houle after the performance, and tuxedo-less he turned out to be a soft-spoken, youthful-looking man who conceded that he was there also as informal quality control for the absent Maddin (who was supervising a performance of the film in Seattle at the time). Mr. Houle allowed as how he was not a filmmaker himself, and knows Maddin via Winnipeg connections.
Later, I was able to learn independently that, far from being an adult singing castrato, a subset of humanity that doesn’t exist anyway, “Dov Houle” is really an actor named Dan Tierney, and in fact only lip-syncs his two songs to the voice of a woman singing off-stage. Mr. Tierney even appears in BUTB, as the child Guy’s new adoptive father, but is relatively unrecognizable under a full mustache.
Brand Upon the Brain is currently touring the country in selected cities, but will eventually appear on DVD with Isabella Rossellini providing the voice of the interlocutor. It’s well worth catching up with, but last night’s live performance was unique, a rarity whose like we shall not see again for some time.