An Orgy for Movie Lovers

Guy Maddin's films always push the boundaries of camp even though camp hardly exists. Filmmakers no longer need to express themselves through codes--or what used to be called "underground" culture. Gay or straight, artists now liberate their fantasies and their lusts. That's why Maddin's romantic-autobiographic documentary My Winnipeg (2007) could boast about Canadian hockey culture with such winning gay appeal. That's also why Maddin's new film The Forbidden Room is a full-tilt orgy for movie lovers -- gay and whatever.

A documentary spoof about a hairy-chested man's bathing rituals turns into a crowded all-male submarine drama which unfurls into endless storylines and baroque images. Like touring a dark mansion of the unconscious, it calls up all imaginable movie genres from family epics to horror films. In a segment titled "The Book of Climaxes," two zeppelins touch tips like in boyhood exploration. It symbolizes Maddin and his co-director Evan Johnson getting Scheherazadean.

They revive the wit of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company (the legendary theater troupe that paid queer tribute to Hollywood divas and cliches) but there's dead-serious conviction in their virtuoso silent movie-era techniques (plus varied and vivid sound and music tracks).

Every meticulous cut, lush superimposition and frenzied dissolve carries a bounty of movie love, distinguished by a recurring fascination with masculine movie-idol types. That submarine crew is led into a pink cave of secrets (evoking James Bidgood's Pink Narcisscus) by Cesare (Roy Dupuis), a bearded Canadian "Saplingjack" in flannel plaid and knit cap. Lumbersexual Cesare sorties through a surreal narrative that features a number of European actors, most significantly Jacques Nolot, the Andre Techine protege who directed the gay classics Porn Theater and Before I Forget. Nolot, who regularly explores gay iconography, provides a guide to the hidden secrets of The Forbidden Room--the kind of omnisexual insights that Jean Cocteau and pioneering gay film critic Parker Tyler and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger first dreamed about.

This overstuffed movie has many highpoints (and low-points when it seems to become "campy") but among the most mysterious and beautiful is Cesare's search for true male allies through a snowy forest; he finds one who stares upward at dark clouds against a blue sky--the gayest, most romantic shot of any 2015 film.

That gorgeous baffling image illustrates Maddin's own quest. He's produced this cinematic orgy because cinephilia -- like camp -- has died (killed by "golden age of television" propaganda that has replaced old-fashioned movie love). The Forbidden Room is not a pop experience that unites audiences; as esoteric art fetish follows erotic fetish, it distracts each individual viewer, gay or whatever. Every bizarre scene in this criss-crossing abstract narrative is followed by a dazzling one. Like an orgy, it is both too much and not enough.

Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room had its New York Premiere at the 53rd New York Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 11. Watch the trailer below: