Brand Upon the Brain!

Criterion Collection, $39.95

Conceived as a traveling spectacle, a silent film accompanied in different cities by different narrators such as Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover, Calvin Johnson, and others, plus a live Foley team, an 11-piece orchestra, and a supposed castrato, Brand Upon the Brain! is another ambitious, audacious entry in the canon of Canadian auteur Guy Maddin. But as part of the director’s personal trilogy (including Cowards Bend the Knee and My Winnipeg), Brand‘s kitschy ghost story of a memoir is rooted in richly realized emotion.

A dreamlike remembrance of childhood in which the past keeps apace with the present, the film recollects Maddin’s (hopefully imagined) childhood on his family island, overseen by a controlling mother that omnisciently eyeballs Guy and Sis from her perch in the island’s lighthouse. An alluring pair of Nancy Drew-style teen detectives arrives to investigate the grisly goings-on at the “mom and pop orphanage” Mother runs, roiling the already troubled waters with jealousy, sexual confusion, and Oedipal terror. (The DVD, arriving with all the extras one expects of a Criterion release, contains the Rossellini-helmed audio track the film had in its regular theatrical release, along with several live recordings.)

Intrinsic to Maddin’s evocation of a haunted, timeless world is his inimitable visual style, a choppy approximation of disintegrating silent film, black-and-white Super-8 stock repeatedly sped up, slowed down, and smeared with Vaseline. But far from being an empty stylist, Maddin has the genius ability to make garish, ghoulish melodrama – whether the quadriplegic beer baroness dancing on glass legs filled with suds from The Saddest Music in the World or the loving, suffocating, undead-raising Mother of Brand – and make it entirely, emotionally real. Far from a halcyon memory, the past in Maddin’s life is inescapable, filled with remorse, fear, passion, and anxiety.

Coming Soon …

Le Doulos and Le Deuxième Souffle (Criterion, $39.95 each): This pair of mid-1960s flicks from the French master of the crime caper, Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge), are also receiving the Criterion treatment. (Oct. 7)

This article appears in September 5 • 2008.

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