Guy Maddin’s sophomore feature, Archangel, takes place in a fantastical crossroads of history, in a hamlet in Russia so remote that the twin shocks of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution have only just reached town limits in 1919. Its plot—of a love triangle between a traumatized WWI veteran (Kyle McCulloch), the woman (Kathy Marykuca) he believes is his dead wife, and her own amnesiac husband (Ari Cohen)—offers something of a précis of narrative tropes and themes that would pervade Maddin’s cinema. There’s the juxtaposition of archaic film form with more risqué sexual exhibition, the slipperiness of memory, and a notion of projection heavily indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Nonetheless, Archangel feels more like a repository of references to the cinema of a hundred years ago than something fully imbued with Maddin’s signature idiosyncrasy. Verohnka, for one, habitually wears a spiky, chintzy crown...
Nonetheless, Archangel feels more like a repository of references to the cinema of a hundred years ago than something fully imbued with Maddin’s signature idiosyncrasy. Verohnka, for one, habitually wears a spiky, chintzy crown...
- 3/11/2024
- by Jake Cole
- Slant Magazine
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