Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

Well, this is quite probably one of the most uncategorisable films I've seen - you couldn't possibly call it a comedy, with its beauty salons that moonlight as abortion clinics/brothels, and its disturbingly self-lacerating portrait of the director as a cowardly lecher and cold-blooded murderer. But parts of it are hilarious. Go figure. In brief, the plot concerns Guy Maddin, hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, who takes his pregnant girlfriend to the above-mentioned clinic for a termination and then leaves her (literally in the middle of the procedure) for the brothel-keeper's beautiful daughter, played with incandescent and slightly scary intensity by Melissa Dionisio (that surely cant be her real name, can it?) only to discover that she can't allow herself to be touched by a man's hands (an uncharacteristically direct quote from Lon Chaney's 'The Unknown') until her father's murder has been avenged. And then she produced the jar in which she keeps, preserved, her father's hands… After that we get a twist on that old chestnut 'The Hands of Orlac', combined with a surprisingly explicit dose of sexual excess and weird psychology, as young Guy ends up in deep trouble of every sort imaginable, through his own inability to control his lusts. Told in ten chapters of six minutes apiece, this was intended as a gallery installation but it works just fine as a movie. As long as you don't mind a regular dose of jawdropping strangeness and a large splash of shocking, unfathomable directorial masochism.

Straight from the guilt mines of Guy Maddin's psyche to the collective unconscious of stunned audiences, "Cowards Bend the Knee" is film autobiography at its most hilariously creative. Like all of Maddin's opuses, "Cowards" vamps silent cinema, here German Expressionism – though its 10-part episodic structure, secret passageways and exclamation point-riddled intertitles owe as much to Feuillade's "Fantomas" or "Vampires" serials. Pic's hour length may limit it to fests, indie cable and, natch, retrospectives of the mad maestro's work.

Conceived as an art installation in Toronto, the voyeuristic "Cowards" was fittingly shown through nickelodeon-style peepholes at the Toronto gallery and later at the Rotterdam and Tribeca fests, with conventional full-screen unspoolings also on tap. Surrealistic action takes place in a hockey arena and an odd beauty parlor. (Maddin's father was a hockey coach, and Maddin as a child lived above his aunt's and mother's beauty parlor.) The rink houses a forgotten wax museum and is crisscrossed by studiolike catwalks, where ghosts of dead lovers stroll. The beauty salon doubles as a bordello, while behind one-way porthole mirrors a demented doctor in a corset (who also serves as medico to the hockey team) performs abortions.

Hero (named Maddin), a slave to lust and cowardice, is shamefully capable of abandoning his old girlfriend in mid-abortion to pursue a new flame. The object of this newfound infatuation is madly in love with her dead father and unwilling to let our hero touch her until he's had his hands chopped off and replaced by her father's blue ones (hence the film's subtitle: "The Blue Hands" ). This leads to quite perverse variations on the killer hands of "Beast With Five Fingers." Events unfold with the logic of a fever-dream, fetishizing cultural artifacts and selected body parts interchangeably through close-ups, spotlights, irises-in, repetitions, double-exposures and all manner of flickering low-tech special effects. The camera travels with anarchic glee past reflective surfaces, gleaming scissors and oiled tresses in this harem-like hothouse of femininity to, somehow, find the unconscious links between beauty parlors and back-room abortion clinics.