Surreal history

The cinema of Canadian director Guy Maddin is practically a genre unto itself. He uses silent film techniques (including making the image look scratched and splicy like an old movie) in the service of telling offbeat surreal stories of misfits. I appreciate his style more than I actually like it. This movie, The Twentieth Century (2019) is the best movie that Maddin didn't make. It's written and directed by Matthew Rankin, a Canadian acolyte of Maddin's, and though it remains, generally, in the avant-garde realm, it's also quite enjoyable, with a straight-forward narrative, a polished (though still surreal) visual style, and characters who act in relatively rational ways (unlike in most of Maddin's movies).

In theory, this is a film about the early life of 1920's Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, but really it uses his personage as a taking-off point into flights of fancy about unrequited love, ambition, and the Canadian national identity. The plot, though easy to follow, is not one that lends itself to summary. Suffice to say that it's concerned with King's early years as he get involved in politics, suffers through a long unrequited love interest, and deals with his bizarre, bedridden mother. Rankin says in the audio commentary that he consulted the diaries of Rankin to write the movie, but I wouldn't be surprised if that comment is mostly a prank as there is virtually no biographical detail here that I find believable--maybe his shoe fetish and his love/hate relationship with a political rival. 

Visually, however, almost every shot is a joy to behold. Shot in limited space, the sets, with some help from old-fashioned visual effects, manage to feel a bit claustrophobic and still fully formed. The fact that the actors all seem to know what they're doing and what's expected of them helps get us past even the strangest details: a giant puppet bird, a seal-clubbing contest to determine fitness for public office, an anti-masturbation machine. Dan Beirne (as King, pictured sniffing a shoe) remains deadpan and sympathetic through every oddity that Rankin puts him through; Brent Skagford's character (King's rival who occasionally seems attracted to King) is not fleshed out but Skagford (pictured with his tongue out, mocking and flirting with King at the same time) makes him fun to be around. Sarianne Cormier (as a nurse with a crush on King), Catherine St-Laurent (as the woman King desires) and Louis Negin (as the monstrous mother) are also quite good. If you're looking for something different, this is it.