Keyhole

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🎙️ EPISODE 684: 04.06.23 🇨🇦 𝙿𝙰𝚁𝚃 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙳𝙸𝚁𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙾𝚁 𝙵𝙾𝙲𝚄𝚂 𝙾𝙽 𝙶𝚄𝚈 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙳𝙸𝙽 🇨🇦 This is weirder and darker than Maddin's recent work, but it also feels more distant, especially on the heels of the very personal masterpiece, My Winnipeg. Set in a house in some uncertain, though decidedly not modern time, Jason Patric — who is kind of the perfect actor for this: handsome and blank, just more canvas for the movie to paint on (surely the only Guy Maddin/Speed 2 venn diagram hit) — plays Ulysses, a father, husband, gangster, ghost? Isabella Rossellini is Hyacinth, his wife and mother to their sons, one of which named Manners is their golden boy and very central to the story. Udo Kier plays a doctor. Louis Negin is back again as Hyacinth's father, chained to her bed and naked as ever. Kids in the Hall's Kevin McDonald tries to fuck a ghost and immediately dies.

In some ways, this is a return to his earliest mode. It's easy to find some thematic resonance here and there, but as a story it feels impossibly (but also wonderfully!) difficult to digest. It's just a marvel of highly creative and weird moments; it makes the very thought of "explaining art," of even attempting to, feel foolish and wrong. The act of passing hair through a keyhole seems to represent this detachment in its own way: how our memories, collective or singular, become an incomprehensible blur, forever out of reach. We know it's there, but can't quite grab it. And as time passes, we only get further away. Things seems to start happening in reverse. Ulysses tells Manners to keep working on his inventions: "you never know what some people may go for." And that feels like a summation of Maddin's career.

Conversation, at times, feels like it was lifted straight out of The Room. Stilted and random even for the Maddinverse. In a flashback (or is it?), Ulysses and his wife and son try to put the house back together, put everything back in its rightful place. People are just a collection of their things (and what they represent) and those things need a place. You can tinker with the things but you can't tinker with what they represent: the lie of time, of memory. Regret, depression, jealousy, envy, joy, rage: these things can be repressed but never fully buried. The pain of knowing what we can't grasp is so central to our being.

There's a constant, lighthouse-like strobe searching the rooms at all times, seeking meaning, everywhere and anywhere. This light is the viewer. It's me, and you too (if you let it). You might find a dildo sticking out of the wall in a secret hallway or you might find Homer's Odyssey. But it's really about the search. And I love that.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 683 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 685A ⫸

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Keyhole is a 2011 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin, starring Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier and Kevin McDonald. A surreal combination of gangster film and haunted house film, which draws on Homer's Odyssey as well, Keyhole tells the story of a Ulysses Pick (Patric), who returns to his home and embarks on an odyssey through the house, one room at a time. Filming began in Winnipeg on July 6, 2010. Maddin shot Keyhole digitally rather than his usual method of shooting on 16mm or Super-8mm. It was released on September 9, 2011.