The Forbidden RoomA lot can happen in a bathtub; maybe not as much in the tub itself as what can happen in the mind of the one taking the bath. Immersed in hot water, the mind wanders...and wanders...drifting deeper and deeper into a state of total hypnosis--or so The Forbidden Room would have us believe. This surreal and unquestionably dreamlike film by master of the bizarre, Guy Maddin--alongside Evan Johnson--is a strange foray into the subconscious, where one dream turns on a tangent into another, and so on, linked by the merest of connections. Let your mind drift as you marinate in a stew of hallucinatory narrative.
|
|
The Forbidden Room is a defiantly unique experience in film, reminiscent of the fevered product of other films by Guy Maddin. Like his prior films, they hearken back to a kind of style and manner of lost celluloid antiquities, from silent film era to others, albeit this entry is possessed of a lurid, over-saturated palette which makes it feel as though it were a demented archive from the 1950s or the like. Deliberately constructed like a collage of thoughts and dreams, even the opening credits of the film set the tone, with a multitude of titles and fonts warping and wending, as if having an epileptic fit of technicolor and silver nitrate. To say that one would need a map to navigate the labyrinthine story of The Forbidden Room would be an oversimplification; a closer approximation to the architecture of the story would be not unlike the works of M.C. Escher, where logic exists, but is its own hyper-exaggerated interpretation of itself. Our "hub" in this dreamscape comes in the form of our own "emcee", a bathrobe-clad fellow calling himself Marv (Louis Negin), who talks of the merits of bathing and the proper form to do so. He makes off-color jokes, and is altogether a bit unsettling, but he's the host we're stuck with. He is, in effect, also our "hypnotist", inviting us deeper down the rabbit hole of a layered narrative, which is not unlike a matryoshka doll, where each dream layer contains another, then another, and so on. The top most layer of this story involves a beleaguered crew of a submarine, under duress because they cannot surface due to the degeneration of a batch of explosives becoming unstable, and they are quickly running out of air, resorting to eating flapjacks to stretch their oxygen (!), because the batter contains air pockets. When a lumberjack makes his way onto the submerged submarine (!!), he struggles to recall his mission to save the lovely Margot (Clara Furey) from the clutches of the wild bandits who have ostensibly captured her. As his story branches out, others follow, including Margot's dreams as an amnesiac, singing a song of the "aswang", a jungle vampire known for the sound of its footsteps being louder the further it is from its prey, and vice versa. Even when the tales get so deep it is nigh impossible to recall how far down one has submerged, there is a towline reaching back up to the surface, coming up for air from the watery dream, for Marv to further comment about his preferred topic, always in the reverse order by which we were dipped into this somniferous sea.
What little I have described in the way of plot is about as much as would be appreciable in a synopsis. There are multitudes of stories, snippets and pieces tied like bows on a string, and a full stable of characters, with some actors playing multiple roles. This is interesting, because those who have dreamed in the steamy comforts of a bath might recall images of stories like these, with repeat players, people we know and re-envision as different shadows. The stories are largely expressions of a mood, filled with esoteric content at once both absurdly funny and even occasionally gross. It is not uncommon for strange, unrelated scenes to follow one another, and for content including a musical number titled "The Final Derriere" to be juxtaposed with images of brain surgery. Sound and image are evocative of a feeling, a subconscious thread running through the id. Amnesia is also a common element in these series of vignettes, as if The Forbidden Room were tied to the disorienting mist of memory loss, and the mind were roaming the foggy back alleys, seeking some way out of the maze. Even more than other vignette films, The Forbidden Room is like a "hyperlink" film, more so because as one story links to another, linking to yet another, and at some point, the dreamer has had enough, and starts clicking that "back" button over and over. Maybe this kind of response is a need to return to the tenuous sanity of Marv's arena, but it also feels like a deliberate search, like a quest performed by the dreamer and the audience as well. In this way, the "hyperlinks" of the dreams are not unlike the kind of insomniac surfing on the internet one does at three in the morning, clicking from one article on Wikipedia to the next and the next, only to find hours have passed and you are nowhere you expected to be in this virtual world; that is what The Forbidden Room is like. It is a channeling of the inner mind given form in film, a hymn to hypnotize and seduce the psyche, a stream of consciousness tale given to sound and image, an archive of a dream.
Recommended for: Fans of experimental films which challenge the viewer's attention and provoke a subconscious reaction. It is bold, strange, funny, unique, and thoroughly entertaining for those who are willing to sacrifice conventional logic for the soporific equivalent.
What little I have described in the way of plot is about as much as would be appreciable in a synopsis. There are multitudes of stories, snippets and pieces tied like bows on a string, and a full stable of characters, with some actors playing multiple roles. This is interesting, because those who have dreamed in the steamy comforts of a bath might recall images of stories like these, with repeat players, people we know and re-envision as different shadows. The stories are largely expressions of a mood, filled with esoteric content at once both absurdly funny and even occasionally gross. It is not uncommon for strange, unrelated scenes to follow one another, and for content including a musical number titled "The Final Derriere" to be juxtaposed with images of brain surgery. Sound and image are evocative of a feeling, a subconscious thread running through the id. Amnesia is also a common element in these series of vignettes, as if The Forbidden Room were tied to the disorienting mist of memory loss, and the mind were roaming the foggy back alleys, seeking some way out of the maze. Even more than other vignette films, The Forbidden Room is like a "hyperlink" film, more so because as one story links to another, linking to yet another, and at some point, the dreamer has had enough, and starts clicking that "back" button over and over. Maybe this kind of response is a need to return to the tenuous sanity of Marv's arena, but it also feels like a deliberate search, like a quest performed by the dreamer and the audience as well. In this way, the "hyperlinks" of the dreams are not unlike the kind of insomniac surfing on the internet one does at three in the morning, clicking from one article on Wikipedia to the next and the next, only to find hours have passed and you are nowhere you expected to be in this virtual world; that is what The Forbidden Room is like. It is a channeling of the inner mind given form in film, a hymn to hypnotize and seduce the psyche, a stream of consciousness tale given to sound and image, an archive of a dream.
Recommended for: Fans of experimental films which challenge the viewer's attention and provoke a subconscious reaction. It is bold, strange, funny, unique, and thoroughly entertaining for those who are willing to sacrifice conventional logic for the soporific equivalent.