Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Brand Upon the Brain!
Directed by Guy Maddin
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., June 15

At festivals and in cities far more enamored with cinema than Philly, the latest honest-to-God silent from Canadian retro stylist Guy Maddin was a veritable event--presented with an 11-piece orchestra, a quintet of busy Foley artists, even live celebrity narrators like Lou Reed, Crispin Glover and Eli Wallach. (For Maddin, this is nothing: His 2003 porn 'n' hockey film Cowards Bend the Knee was an installation piece where viewers had to kneel down and peer through peep holes for 60-some minutes.)

Isabella Rossellini, who pranced about in beer-filled glass legs in Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World, serves as the narrator for the official locked-down version playing here.

Fortunately Brand Upon the Brain! doesn't require bells and whistles to work. It's also not Maddin merely spinning his wheels. As the director has become more well-known, there's been a fear he'd segue into self-parody, or worse, sell out.

It's true Brand isn't quite as inspired or conceptually bold as his past work. But that's just because Maddin's gone for a tighter concentration--no highs, but no lows either. Even the dizzying rapid-fire style is still in full force. It's Guy Maddin maturing--in baby steps.

Like Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand jokingly purports to be autobiographical, with "Guy Maddin" (embodied by Erik Steffen Maahs) returning to his remote island home after 30 years. There he recalls his long-suppressed childhood: his mad scientist father, his tyrannical mother who spied on her children from a lighthouse, and his sister who came under the spell of a visiting boy detective who's played by a female actress.

The Freudian fever dream that follows, with its reams of sexual confusion, is neatly sustained over the film's 95 minutes--partly because it's wisely divided into 12 chapters, and partly because Brand isn't just a cheap piece of po-mo irony.

Maddin's tone is difficult to pin down. He loves to toy around with the purpleness of silent film, firing off jokey intertitles (e.g., "To mingle with breath like his!" or "Smitten!!!"). But he also genuinely loves the language of silents, and no matter how comically overwrought Brand gets, there's unmistakable deep feeling in the film's concerns.

Brand may not be as satisfying as The Heart of the World or Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, but it's the first to suggest a dead-serious Maddin film may not be a bad thing.

Frosty Franco-American relations aside, Hollywood has long been a major exporter to France. B-movies instigated the French New Wave. Slick, brainless actioneers inspired Gallic tyro Luc Besson. And now, apparently, the trend toward attractive actresses self-importantly uglying themselves up (Nicole Kidman in The Hours, Charlize Theron in Monster, etc.) has materialized via La Vie en Rose, in which Marion Cotillard embodies legendary French songbird Edith Piaf.

In real life, the 31-year-old actress is a foot taller and (more important) exactly 10 billion times hotter than her screen subject, who was France's No. 1 chanteuse through the first half of the last century. In all honesty, it's only when the focus is on the later years--when the morphine-headed Piaf deteriorated into a hunchback and died at 47--that the physical stunt really takes hold.

But even before the makeup and prosthetic crew goes into overdrive, Cotillard's playing to the rafters, unleashing so many tics you can't help but wonder if AMPAS can give her two Oscars. Cotillard's a first-rate lip syncher, but this isn't so much a performance (like, say, Michael Sheen's Tony Blair in The Queen) as an animatronic Piaf impersonation. Drag queens will be studying this performance for decades.

But Cotillard's overpraised mimicry isn't what buries La Vie en Rose. In interviews, director Olivier Dahan has claimed not to have made a traditional biopic. This should come as something of a shock to audience members for the first two-thirds of the movie, which--apart from the occasional flashforward to an older Piaf--essentially sticks to the genre's tiresome this-happened-then-this-happened formula.

It doesn't help that Piaf's life boasts an almost comically run-of-the-mill rise-and-fall arc. Raised by prostitutes and carnies (if not, alas, at the same time), Piaf was discovered crooning on the streets for money. Her graduation to international stardom and then to beatific decay features its share of glaring omissions (the WWII era, most notably). But what's really missing is a take on Piaf's raging, oft-unsightly egomania--a subject on which the film nervelessly pleads the fifth.

As a filmmaker, Dahan is a lush technician, but Rose doesn't take off till the final 20 minutes, when the film suddenly morphs into an expressionistic blend of loose ends, time jumps and details Dahan just never got around to (Piaf had a daughter?).

Dahan is sly enough to leave his audience on a high (see also: The Sixth Sense, suckas), but not crafty enough to have made anything more than another flat, hagiographic biopic.