Careful

CAREFUL   ***1/2

Guy Maddin

1992

IDEA:  In an Alpine village where all residents must be extremely quiet to avoid setting off an avalanche, two brothers train to become butlers while competing for the affection of the same woman.

BLURB:  In Guy Maddin’s cinema of psychosexual delirium, unconscious drives and anxieties are never hidden and rarely subtextual: they always rush unabated across the surface, their primitive origins unearthed in tandem with the archaic filmic idioms the director has made a career of recreating. Careful is one of his early peaks, as well as a great exemplification of how he animates his psychoanalytic preoccupations – hyperbolically, absurdly – at the level of the text. Here, Maddin conjures an early Technicolor-style burlesque of lurid Freudianism, replete with overlapping Oedipal dramas, elaborate castration fantasies, death wishes, and, always, neurotically repressed desires fit to burst. The last point finds its ingenious geographic manifestation in the film’s Alpine town, wherein acting on one’s feelings – even so much as a sneeze – might literally unleash a deadly avalanche upon the community. This being Maddin, whose characters always fail spectacularly at suppressing their sweaty impulses, there’s little question that such feelings will erupt. As caution and propriety are repeatedly, perversely breached, Careful builds in hysteria, its biliously tinted frames and arch, deadpan dialog giving it the tenor of a waking fever dream. For Maddin, that’s just what cinema is – and often life, too.