BRAND UPON THE BRAIN Criterion DVD Review
8/27/2008
Posted by ColliderStaff
Reviewed by Monika Bartyzel
Anyone fortunate enough to see one of the live performances of Brand Upon the Brain – with its live orchestra, foley artists, castrato singer, and celebrity narrator – would think that it wouldn’t be possible to repeat the environment at home. While it certainly can’t live up to the big-screen performances, the Criterion release of Guy Maddin’s partially biographical film comes quite close.
For the uninitiated, Guy Maddin is an avante garde Canadian filmmaker who creates strange, Lynchian worlds of quirk and fantasy. But unlike David Lynch, Maddin’s highly stylized films are steeped in humor and are easy to follow even when Maddin is at his most manic. After his triumph The Saddest Music in the World, which merged a contest for the singer of the saddest music with the tale of a dysfunctional family and Prohibition-era beer shenanigans, Maddin received a last-minute invite to make a new film.
Instead of hurriedly whipping up a script in a few weeks, Maddin chose to merge autobiographical elements with current obsessions to create a strange silent film. A newfound interest in teen detectives merged with memories of his past as Brand quickly began to take shape.
At the request of his dying mother, a slightly fictionalized Guy heads to his childhood home – an island lighthouse that was an orphanage when Guy and Sis (his sister) were young. As he coats the lighthouse in new paint, Guy’s memories of the past he is covering begin to overtake him. He is transported back to his young self, where he and Sis struggle under the strict and watchful eye of their mother. But it’s more than just a tale of adolescence – the orphans have strange marks on the back of their skulls, which inspires teen detectives Wendy and Chance to come and investigate. Soon the silent world is thrown into the chaos of unstoppable teenage sexuality and youth-inspired mad-scientist experiments.
While this DVD doesn’t have an add-water-to-grow orchestra, foley artists, narrator, and castrato, it does its best to replicate the live experience – however you experienced it. By that, I mean that you can choose which narrator to listen to, which instantly gives you seven different ways to view the film. It also gives fans of the live experience a chance to see what it was like with the other narrators who performed the film – Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Guy Maddin, Louis Negin, and Eli Wallach.
On top of that, there’s a long documentary called 97 Percent True, which discusses the evolution of Maddin as a filmmaker and details about how Brand Upon the Brain came to be – from its inception to some of the true stories surprisingly held within the film. (It’s particularly interesting to hear him talk about how truthful the beach burial scene actually was.) On top of that, there’s two new Maddin short films to check out, a deleted portion of the film, the trailer, and an essay by film critic Dennis Lim.
Guy Maddin is the indie beacon in a world of mainstream, fast-paced comedy. While his work is stylized, funky, and entirely unlike the usual comedic fare, it’s also just as entertaining, well-paced, and insanely enjoyable. With Brand, Maddin has created a work of art that is a triumph in art and comedy.
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