In the Name of the Father

Illuminating the past: Isabella Rossellini in Guy Maddin's documentary My Dad is 100 Years Old. Photo Jody Shapiro. Courtesy NSI FilmExchange.

In his 20-year career, Winnipeg’s Guy Maddin has shown himself to be a prairie-gothic fabulist, a purveyor of fever-dream melodrama and a heartsick nostalgist infatuated with outdated film styles.

So why is this artifice-adoring filmmaker making a documentary about Roberto Rossellini, the late Italian neorealist whose slow, simple, often stark work was an attempt to record the humble truths of ordinary lives?  

It’s not an obvious pairing, but then My Dad is 100 Years Old is not a conventional documentary. The super-compressed 17-minute short — shot in crushed-velvet black and white — is a collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, Roberto’s daughter with Ingrid Bergman. Isabella plays all the parts in the film’s eccentric “re-enactments,” including a jaunty Federico Fellini, an acerbic Alfred Hitchcock, a winsome Charlie Chaplin and — most moving of all — her own mother.

Rossellini also reveals herself as a gifted writer, combining a delicate lament for her father with a robust argument about the nature and purpose of cinema. (“She knows her film history from the womb out,” says Maddin.)

This short work premiered at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, but has a homecoming this week at Winnipeg’s National Screen Institute FilmExchange Canadian Film Festival. With its all-Canadian lineup of shorts and features, this four-day program is the country’s coolest film festival — at least in terms of average wind-chill-adjusted temperature. It’s perhaps the only film fest in the world with an outdoor event that involves projecting movies onto an 8 x 10-foot block of snow.

My Dad is a reunion of sorts for Rossellini and Maddin, who first worked together on The Saddest Music in the World, which played to packed houses on the closing night of the 2004 FilmExchange. In that film, Rossellini proved herself a tremendous good sport in the service of Maddin’s eccentric vision, playing a Depression-era beer baroness with a platinum wig and glass legs that sloshed with ale whenever she moved. This time around, Maddin is trying to return the favour. “I couldn’t go on my usual self-indulgent spree,” he admits in a recent phone conversation. “I had to make a client happy, and when I did, I really felt like a grown-up.”

While the 50-year-old Maddin seems sincerely convinced that what he calls his “usual hijinks” have been thrown out the window, My Dad features typically extravagant Maddinesque touches. For example, the elder Rossellini is represented by a giant talking stomach, a reference to Isabella’s memories of her father’s soft, warm, almost maternal belly.

Whose film is it anyways?: Maddin and his star, Rossellini. Photo Jody Shapiro. Courtesy NSI FilmExchange.

Maddin’s filmmaking mode is an issue the two collaborators address in the film. At one point, Isabella speaks to Maddin’s hovering camera with mock severity: “Why is that up there? Why is it moving? My father would call these camera moves immoral because they are pretentious and unnecessary.” She demands that Maddin bring the camera down, so that it’s “eye-level, centred, in the perfect, simple Rossellini framing.” Isabella’s involvement is paradoxical, rooted in her realization that communion with her father can never be accomplished under the strict auspices of neorealist truth, but only through “dreams, imagination and memory.” Which is where Maddin’s gently haunted cinemascape comes in.

For Maddin, the film fell into place once they decided on their location, a defunct movie palace in Winnipeg’s downtown core called the Metropolitan. Maddin thinks of it as “a theatre in limbo, where all these godless, dead directors are probably sitting right now, arguing.” With the Met’s faded glamour swathed in smoke and shadows, the phantoms (played by Rossellini) start to emerge. Cigar-chomping, bottom-lining producer David O. Selznick comes down on the side of storytelling: “Film should illustrate novels, that’s the best entertainment — like my Gone With the Wind.” Hitchcock — speaking in portentous tones from an upper balcony, where he is shot in iconic side profile — champions movies as an escape.

Roberto Rossellini, meanwhile, spits out his distrust of cinematic pleasure, berating Fellini for abandoning the narrow neorealist path for the broad boulevard of dreams — “wet dreams,” the former adds, somewhat spitefully. Rossellini softens a little at the appearance of Chaplin, though, whom he considers a clown with a conscience.

Perhaps the most mysterious encounter involves Isabella’s dialogue with her mother, Ingrid Bergman, who appears full blown on the Met’s silver screen with all the cool allure of a Hitchcock heroine. This is a risky venture, but never for one moment does the scene seem gimmicky or self-indulgent. Maddin’s dreamscape is so completely realized that it seems perfectly natural that Isabella could ask her dead mother why she fell in love with her dead father.

Watching Rossellini play these luminaries, we get a clearer sense not just of her father and his films, but of her. More beautiful now than when she was a Lancôme supermodel, she can be like a little girl whispering for her dead dad. Addressing the camera, Rossellini says that if she had to divide her life into two distinct periods, the line would fall on June 3, 1977 — the day her father died of a heart attack at age 71. But she is also stringently honest about Roberto’s willfully difficult film legacy.

Chronically modest, Maddin is a little daunted having his work merged with Papa Rossellini’s, which is represented in the film by clips of Open City (1945). Maddin manages to put his own spin on the maestro. Maddin views neorealism not as unmediated moral truth, but as another kind of cinematic style. He considers Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief — probably the best known of the neorealist films in North America — to be “a really well-told tragic fairytale.”

“You can’t just go into some peasant’s kitchen with a film crew,” Maddin points out. “Not without knocking a wall out to fit all your equipment.”

This might be something Maddin himself is coming to terms with, as he works on a feature-length documentary about his hometown. “I could easily make it 12 hours long,” he states, adding that the process has confirmed his view that Winnipeg is a world-class city, provided “you’re looking at really arcane categories.”

Maddin would certainly agree with Rossellini’s maxim that a director must keep budgets small in order to retain creative control. So far, Maddin has not only resisted the siren song of commercial cinema, but has remained so stubbornly isolated and iconoclastic that he’s even outside the indie canon. If his luxuriantly creative, unclassifiable collaboration with Rossellini is anything to go by, he won’t be coming in from the cold any time soon, at least.

The NSI FilmExchange Canadian Film Festival runs Mar. 1-4 at various venues around Winnipeg.

Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg.

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