Archangel

Love lost, found, then lost again forever illuminates the shadows of Maddin’s wildly opaque half talkie, a delirious yet touching melo noir drama inhabited by a phalanx of amnesiacs plagued by obsession, mustard gas apoplexy or both. The circular narrative revolves around John Boles, a displaced soldier at the end of the Great War steeped in loss: for his country (Canada), his girl (Iris), and his leg (the right one). Arriving in Archangel, a Russian outpost still fighting the war, Boles falls madly in love with Iris’ double, Veronkha, who has forgotten she’s married to a brain injured war vet (who himself only remembers their wedding night). A post traumatic fever dream directed by an amnesiac who has forgotten he’s living in the early Nineties, Archangel fixates more over Von Sternbergian moments of ritual than narrative clarity. Maddin’s early masterpiece is exceedingly faithful to the filmic and patriotic sentiments of the postwar, while being indebted to Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest and, of course, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film that haunts Maddin’s oeuvre like a holy whore. Still, the director makes innumerable original contributions, including an intestine strangling scene and film history’s most memorable calm before the storm scene involving fluffy bunny rabbits. Maddin: `An elaborate excuse for my erratic behaviour using amnesia as the ultimate excuse for everything.’ (M.P.)