When your eccentric silent-film-worshipping Canadian indie feature opens with a credit for Louis Negin you’re definitely admitting a Guy Maddin influence. Convoluted, fictionalized story of Mackenzie King, a politician introduced at the Hospital for Defective Children falling for a harpist. Just in chapter one there’s an Isle of Dogs cable car, a muppet cockatoo, and Negin as King’s mother – with nine chapters to go, it’s all a bit much. That’s not a complaint, it’s an admission that I need to watch a second time.
Lotta androgyny and excellent deco designs… guy who looks like De Niro in Brazil with a cactus hand, and love interest who looks like a young Pearl Forrester (this is Catherine St-Laurent of Tu dors Nicole)… I had fun.
Justine Smith in Little White Lies:
In one sequence, a series of candidates pledge their allegiance to the Great Disappointment (aka the Canadian flag) and engage in a series of mediocre competitions to test their passive-aggressiveness and thresholds for shame. Far from being a representation of Canada’s best vying for leadership, the sequence reveals a succession of pitiful and desperately vain men who act as though becoming prime minister is their birthright. They wish to govern the country not to make it better but to facilitate their own ambitions.
L-R: muppet, dad, Mackenzie