(Above: needs no explanation.)
Lamentation:
My hometown is a stone’s throw from San Francisco, so I know the city well-- well enough to know that over the past two decades the city has changed dramatically. Maybe my perception is skewed… maybe San Francisco has always been a exclusionary epicenter of frivolity, a city that has always tries to conceal its vanity and laud itself for an ‘apparent’ progressiveness. But when I talk to my politically moderate dad (someone who lived in San Francisco in the 60s as a young man) I imagine a different city—a beautiful, down-to-earth place that allowed people from all walks of life to live in its perimeters.
Basically, I have mixed-feelings about “The City”, as locals like to call it, and as a response to these misgivings, I have more of a desire to live in Los Angeles (a city that, in the minds of die-hard San Franciscans, only exists to serve the purpose of being San Francisco’s Other… but that’s for an essay onto itself). So it was appropriate that I attended the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival to see screenings of two movies that are essentially about people having complicated feelings towards their hometowns: Barry Jenkin’s debut feature Medicine for Melancholy and Guy Maddin’s self-proclaimed documentary fantasia My Winnipeg. On the surface, these are very different films-- Medicine for Melancholy is a slightly stylized slice-of-life that recalls such movies as Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man and Agnes Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7, and My Winnipeg is a whirl of a film that is like an artifact from a parallel, over-the-top universe where A Christmas Story is directed by David Lynch and edited by Kenneth Anger. Yet, at the center of both of these films, either completely or partially, are men who let their civic dissatisfaction affect their personal relationships with their past or with people in their lives.
But, because they are both very personal films that manage to be very entertaining, it would be a disservice to give the impression that Medicine for Melancholy and My Winnipeg are impenetrable, ultra-serious affairs. Likewise, the discontent at the heart of these movies is a discontent that’s nearly universal. Who hasn’t both loved and hated their hometown? And who doesn’t get any satisfaction from commiserating with others over these mixed-feelings towards their hometown? For me, these are the reasons why Medicine for Melancholy and My Winnipeg work so well-- they explore the complicated dramas that we all have with the places where we grew up.
MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY (dir. Berry Jenkins, 2008)
(Above: The trailer for Medicine for Melancholy)
Like a man who knows how to make a date go well, comedian Wyatt Cenac steals the show as Micah in Medicine for Melancholy. Tracey Higgins is good, and she has her moment to shine at the end, but Cenac plays Micah so well as to suggest that he has all-too-often been like Micah in his own life. You know-- the guy who wants to please others but does so for vaguely selfish reasons. (Yes, because I’m a guy, I easily related to Cenac/Micah, and that's probably the reason why his performance impressed me more. Yet despite this preference of mine, if Medicine for Melancholy doesn’t serve as a calling card for Cenac and Higgins, then there is no justice in the world.) However, as a Caucasian, I have never really, fully been in Micah’s or Jo’s shoes, and with aplomb Medicine for Melancholy shows how institutionalized marginalization can still affect those who aren’t white in our supposed ‘post-racial’ society.
While Jo is a post-transplant San Franciscan who has no definite, strong feelings about the place, Micah was born and raised in San Francisco, and he doesn’t like what’s happening to his home-city. Gentrification is on the rise and as a result it’s becoming harder and harder for Micah to find black San Franciscans who he can identify with. “You ever think about how black folks are only 7% of the city? You ever realize how few of us there really are?” Micah at one point asks Jo. In another conversation, centered around a piece of DIY artwork that’s hanging in Micah’s tiny apartment that challenges the civic doublespeak that drives Gentrification, it becomes justifiably clear that Micah believes that he’s being squeezed out of the city he loves. Furthermore, there’s a brief sequence in which Micah and Jo eavesdrop on a political meeting in the Mission district in which Activists talk about current mayor Gavin Newsom’s San Francisco and how, through a specious lack of rent control, the city is becoming a plutocracy. (Yet, Micah’s complex is not only caused by impersonal, external forces—he’s also rebounding from a failed relationship with a woman who happens to be white, which only complicates things further.)
Medicine for Melancholy starts out in the territory of another indie film Before Sunrise and manages to pull off the neat trick of becoming about something more—an honest, un-glorified portrayal of the city of San Francisco. As a whole, this is an almost perfect sociological snapshot. Writer/director Barry Jenkins has made a movie that perfectly mixes the personal with the political, and it has true resonance. This is a movie about loneliness and how it can make desperate saps out of us all, but it is in equal part a movie about how loneliness can be caused by things that are largely out of our control. And this is how I could relate to Medicine for Melancholy despite the obvious differences I have with Micah or Jo, and because of his mad film-making skills, Barry Jenkins is a name to watch. **** out of *****.
MY WINNIPEG (dir. Guy Maddin, 2007)
(Above: The trailer for My Winnipeg.)
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the way you or I look at it), trying to do a plot synopsis of My Winnipeg is like an exercise in futility. My Winnipeg is a movie that needs to be experienced. Describing it doesn’t do full justice.
Yet, I’ll try: in recent interviews, Guy Maddin has pointed out that My Winnipeg is the final part of what he calls “his autobiographical trilogy” (the first two parts being Coward Bends the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain!) and the intent of this trilogy is to cinematically explore his masochism, and the pleasure that he receives from picking at his own psychological scabs. Yet, if Maddin thinks that no one will enjoy watching a movie in which he spews his psyche onto the screen with formalistic panache, then he needs to spend more time with his therapist, because My Winnipeg is a hoot. And by the way in which Maddin narrates his own film (he’s an utter ham), it’s clear that he’s permiting you to vicariously and playfully revel in his own filth.
In an explicit, melodramatic manner, My Winnipeg is not just about Maddin’s own personal psychodramas with the past; it’s about all of our own personal psychodramas with our pasts. There’s the old phrase about the past that tells us that ‘it was never that bad, and it was never that good’. But Maddin doesn’t care about the veracity of that adage—he cares about Mythology, and, in the Sam Fuller sense of the term (“…in one word: emotion”), he cares about Cinema. So, he wants it to THAT bad, and he wants it to be THAT good, and he’s going to make it all hurt so good that you’re going to be utterly enchanted with and tickled by the hyperbolic heights that he’ll reach as a film-maker. Case-in-point: the ‘family’ re-enactments that Maddin stages through-out My Winnipeg are like scenes from those famous, blow-out noirs of the 1950s (In a Lonely Place and Kiss Me Deadly) and they play like gangbusters. It’s no accident that Maddin cast Detour femme fatale Ann Savage as his mother—because of the old-fashioned bluntness of her delivery, she comes across as the universal parental Super-Ego that dogs all of our minds. Yet, did I mention that it’s hilarious?
At times while watching My Winnipeg, I felt like I was on one of those walking ghost tours of a city, but the ghosts in question were not only those who use to live in Winnipeg, but also Winnipeg itself, its historical events and its buildings. And Maddin’s constant narration maintains the right touch, for he seems to be a man who forever has his tongue in his cheek. Considering what a juggling act this movie is, as well as the fact that it manages to be more than just a hyper-stylized navel-gazing session, My Winnipeg is a demonstration of Maddin working at his apogee. God speed, Maddin, you mad-man you. God speed. ****1/2 out of *****
P.S. I hate HTML scripting. How can people do this for a living?
