Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

Genre-Bending at its finest

I agree with much of the last review, especially on the point of Lynch, but the last viewer had a couple things wrong that I would like to clear up. Though Maddin takes some clear liberties, the film can more easily be classified as a melodrama than one at first thinks. The points of sorrow, and coincidence are overly exaggerated and all human emotion is exploded onto the screen. Maddin's films are very typical of this extreme irony, especially Saddest Music in the World. One thing that most people don't know about this film is that it was originally designed as a ten part video installation, not a short film. If you view it as such, and try to look at it as you would other visual arts, and not film, I think that you will enjoy it a lot more and truly get a sense of the avant-garde flavor this film has to offer. December 13, 2007

Out-Lynches Lynch

Understand that I'm getting a bit tired of people comparing every strange movie that comes along to a David Lynch film too. Unfortunately, Lynch is the norm and just about one of the most accessible strange filmmakers out there, so sometimes the comparison is needed for a starting point, like in this case.

This movie is, roughly speaking, the story of a swinging hockey player who gets entrapped in a bunch of relationships, including most prominently one with a scarred daughter who wants her father's death revenged. Her father's killer? Her mother. It includes but is not limited to perverse sexuality, weird psychoses, and severed arms.

It's shot in black and white and is a silent film, which creates for it a sort of removed surreality/abstractness which is, honestly, reminiscent of Eraserhead and Lynch's Lumiere and Company short.

What makes it Maddin's, though, is the use of imagery from his childhood (the barbershop, the hockey players, etc.) set to a blatant sexuality which goes beyond just being blatant but enforces it: you see the sexual image, and then the words follow saying exactly what you were thinking. No more subtlety and deranged fetishes, this is straight-forward Freud and primal scene.

Because of this, this film as a whole remains true to itself and never lets go of its own private Universe, one that we could never live in and yet, terribly, can relate to, figure out, and eventually even understand.

Beyond that, there's not much that can be talked about this movie besides the fact that it there's no common approach to it. It has no genre (besides maybe Silent film) and is disconcerting, requiring a certain level of viewer interaction that most movies don't ask for. For fans of strange and insane cinema, it's great; for anybody looking to be entertained, this is most definitely not for you.

--PolarisDiB December 8, 2005

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