The Forbidden Room | Little White Lies

The For­bid­den Room

10 Dec 2015 / Released: 11 Dec 2015

Words by Anton Bitel

Directed by Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin

Starring Clara Furey, Louis Negin, and Roy Dupuis

Closeup of a person with curly hair and closed eyes, illuminated by warm lighting.
Closeup of a person with curly hair and closed eyes, illuminated by warm lighting.
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Anticipation.

You know what you’re in for with Guy Maddin. The question is how crazy will it be.

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Enjoyment.

This is a whole bathtub full of crazy. In a good way.

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In Retrospect.

A cinematic cleansing like no other.

Lose your­self in the mind-bend­ing majesty of Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s cine odyssey.

Hel­lo, I’m Marv,” a white-haired, bespec­ta­cled man (Louis Negin) says direct to cam­era, his half-open robe hang­ing at a louche angle over his oth­er­wise naked body, near the begin­ning of Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The For­bid­den Room. Today we’re going to dis­cuss baths.” They are worth dis­cussing. For as we lie in the bath­tub, there is a col­li­sion of grime and clean­li­ness, of expi­a­to­ry purifi­ca­tion and bare-assed sexuality.

The nat­ur­al stench of our body’s odours and emis­sions is grad­u­al­ly wiped by the head­i­ly exot­ic per­fume of the soap. As we wash away the accrued film of smut and filth, we melt in the moist warmth, our mind drifts, and we are remade, becom­ing a refreshed dou­ble of our dirt­i­er selves, ready to face the world, or per­haps even a lover – who, if we are lucky, has sim­i­lar­ly washed, in prepa­ra­tion to get sweaty and soiled all over again.

The For­bid­den Room is not real­ly about baths – but still, as Marv’s lessons (and dirty jokes) leak into the film’s flu­id tex­tures and watery depths, view­ers are like­ly to find them­selves ful­ly immersed in all the Maddin mad­ness. If the open­ing cred­its inter­mix old-world title sequences from mul­ti­ple sto­ries though unsta­ble cel­lu­loid-like media that burn, melt and fray around the edges, all this is a fit­ting pre­lude to the mind-bend­ing labyrinth of impos­si­bly inter­po­lat­ed tales and dia­bol­i­cal digres­sions that follows.

LWLies Week­ly – The For­bid­den Room issue

The paint­ed back­drops, the vase­line-smeared lens­es, the tint­ed images, the over­wrought ges­tur­al per­for­mances, the hyper­bol­ic score, the end­less suc­ces­sion of sen­sa­tion­al­ist, bizarre and often lewd inter­ti­tles – these retro stylings have become a sig­na­ture of Maddin’s work, and here they are the gooey glue that beau­ti­ful­ly, if bare­ly, holds togeth­er his free asso­ci­a­tions. It is as though ran­dom episodes from dif­fer­ent 1930s ser­i­al melo­dra­mas were sent swirling togeth­er down the same plug­hole, in a descend­ing spi­ral of dizzy­ing­ly lost con­nec­tions and bent plumb­ing – like Woj­ciech Has’ The Saragos­sa Man­u­script rein­vent­ed as horni­ly fetishis­tic hal­lu­ci­na­tion by some­one who has gone heavy on the bath salts.

It is not so much that there is no nar­ra­tive – on the con­trary, there is a sur­feit of sto­ries here, each unnerv­ing­ly odd in its own right and all linked togeth­er by a desul­to­ry log­ic that belongs to a dream – or at least to steamy, sudsy rever­ie. In the mid­dle of one sto­ry about sea­men TRAPPED!” (as a hyper­bol­ic inter­ti­tle has it) in their sub­ma­rine the SS Plunger” and forced to sur­vive off the pock­ets of oxy­gen in their flap­jacks, the mys­te­ri­ous lum­ber­jack Cesare (Roy Dupuis) mys­te­ri­ous­ly drops in, and tells the des­per­ate crew, in search of their miss­ing cap­tain, the par­al­lel sto­ry of his own quest to res­cue his beloved Mar­got (Clara Furey) from her wild abduc­tors the Red Wolves. Things eccen­tri­cal­ly and con­cen­tri­cal­ly spi­ral from there.

The result is cer­tain­ly full of bog­gling puz­zle­ments”, but also of ideas and inven­tion, of errant eros and unfath­omable (if not strict­ly bot­tom­less) hilar­i­ty. So sit back, unwind, and lose your­self to this trans­glob­al tubthump­ing oneiro-epic bath­time of the psy­che – for some good, if ques­tion­ably clean, fun.

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