alternative
film review
forbidden room
guy maddin
DISOWN ALL IMPATIENCE UPON ENTRY
3:36 PM“Forbidden Room” is an eccentric loosely joined portmanteau film which tries to recreate the visual aesthetic of silent films. Instead of evoking the ghost of the past for a healthy dose of nostalgia and delight for the avid fans, the formal qualities of the films long lost are paraded for dubious artistic goals.
The story is utterly absurd at its core.
There is a guy instructing the audience on how to take a bath, men sinking on a
submarine surviving on oxygen bubbles from flapjacks, women being abducted in a
forest and hundreds more nested in each other like some strange nested dolls
which never meant to go into each other. You go down this endless rabbit hole
which at first, exhilarates with its novelty and refreshing lack of logic. After
the hundredth story gets pulled out literally from someone's heard hair, the
magic starts to fade. The "Airplane"-style jokes playing with the
literal and metaphorical meaning offer a slight detour from all the surrealism
but, eventually, fail to add anything of substance. Surrealism is a beautiful
thing if it leads to something other than itself but in this case, there's
nothing to be found in the rabbit hole. It's the "Inception" of the
alternative crowd - the superficial cleverness hides an abyss of meaning at the
centre of the film. It is a lamb disguised as a wolf.
The endless stories are set up in a style resembling
that of silent films. The "much-loved" carbon copy look with
over-saturated colours and numerous title cards is an obvious nod to the
aesthetics of silent films. However, that's where the resemblance ends. The
irrepressible sense of awe of the possibilities and naiveté inherent to
pre-talkies is nowhere to be seen. Instead, "Forbidden Room" bears a
sense of snobbish hindsight, an uneasy feeling of look how far we've come which
leaves a slightly bad taste in your mouth.
The chances that you have never seen anything
like "Forbidden Room" before are fairly high. The originality though,
runs only skin-deep. The plot is designed to confuse and the aesthetics attract
but never serve. It is a murky mess of a film which churns out a lot of fluff
but not much more. It is the epitome of the vacuum of meaning in the centre of a
stereotypical arthouse fare - the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak.
Image references
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