The Forbidden Room

Guy Maddin has been making strange, surreal films that evoke the images and storytelling traditions of silent movies for decades. The Forbidden Room, co-directed with his former student Evan Johnson, plays like a compendium of his obsessions. It opens with the mock-instructional film "How to Take a Bath," shifts to a submarine trapped at the bottom of the sea where a lumberjack (Roy Dupuis) inexplicably appears and tells his story of a feral forest adventure and a damsel in distress, moves to an exotic nightclub out of an old Hollywood movie, and so on. The film arose from a pair of museum installations (in Montreal and Paris) where Maddin "remade" lost films and unfinished projects from the silent and early sound era, so this is a collection of scenes and movie clichés reworked with campy exaggeration and absurd, cartoonish twists. Made with a minimal budget—using a production design that favors ingenuity and creativity—the cast includes such major European actors as Geraldine Chaplin, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, and recent Oscar-nominee Charlotte Rampling. Maddin "ages" his films with scuffs and scratches and cracks and even distorts frames (suggesting decaying nitrate prints from the 1920s). The result defies logical explanation, let alone coherent description, but will likely appeal to fans of foreign film, silent movies, and performance art. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)