CarefulWhat we repress has a nasty way of emerging in the most bizarre and awkward of ways. Careful is a surreal romantic drama about a small village high up in the mountains called Tolzbad, where even the barking of dogs and other noises can trigger a devastating avalanche...that's why the animals all have their vocal cords severed, of course. In this strange community lives a family of three adult sons--Johann (Brent Neale), Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch), and Franz (Vince Rimmer)--who live with their youthful, widowed mother, Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska). After Johann proposes to Karla (Sarah Neville), he experiences an erotic dream of his mother that awakens perverse desires and triggers a metaphorical avalanche of change, throwing the family and town into a tailspin.
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In keeping with Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's body of work, Careful is a strange movie that embraces classic cinematic techniques while telling a story loaded with unusual and even uncomfortable subject matter that would never have flown in the early days of cinema. With a deliberately distressed look to his 16mm film, and with a color palette that is everything from monochromatic coloring to something resembling colorization, Careful manages to create unease and black comedy in its appearance alone. Broken up into two decidedly uneven parts and a prologue, Careful establishes that Tolzbad is a horrible place to live, not just because of the dangers inherent in living on the side of a precarious mountain, but in the way that the village's customs have made people into neurotics. People whisper to be "careful" constantly, and hold back any rise of emotion, so as not to bring suffering to the community. When Johann confesses to Karla that he loves her (while whispering, mind you), her father Herr Trotta (Victor Cowie), and Zenaida remark that even from a distance, the valley allows them to eavesdrop. It's in these whispers that lurk unrealized desires. Shortly after this proposal, Johann experiences his confusing dream about his mother, and afterward is torn, believing that his sexual impulses are for her, even though in reality it comes from his attraction to Karla. Johann and Grigorss appear to be like overgrown children; even the uniforms they wear to butler school resemble those worn by schoolboys. They have zero sexual understanding, so it makes a kind of perverse sense that when these feelings are awakened in Johann that he interprets his dreams literally instead of in the Freudian sense.
The movie is filled with tragicomic moments like a baby wearing an eyepatch (lost to a brooch pin) who loses his other eye as an adult due to a cuckoo clock. (This man turns out to be the late pater familias of Johann, etc.) Subsequently, he plummets to his death from a mountain because he is now totally blind, wearing two eyepatches. That same father (Michael O'Sullivan) appears before the mute (and apparently paralyzed) Franz as a ghost and warns him of Johann's plan to seduce their mother, ignorant of the fact that Franz can do nothing about it, because he doesn't see that he's disabled. It doesn't help that Franz has been exiled to the attic by his mother, who holds a grudge against him for no better reason than that she conceived him when she was not thinking about her erstwhile love, the reclusive Count Knotkers (Paul Cox). The Count is all but worshiped in town and lives in his opulent mansion, while the rest of Tolzbad toils in the mines or goes to "butler school" solely to serve him. People caught in avalanches are discovered decades later by their children and widows, looking as lifelike as they did at the time of their passing. So affecting was this discovery, Careful presents, that to avoid any possibility of these popsicle people returning to life, the dead now had an iron nail driven into their hearts--as if someone truly believed that they might be something like vampires; and, of course, the whole town goes along with the madness. If you're like me, as I write these strange descriptions of the setting and its characters, and the outright weirdness they embody, you're scratching your head wondering how anyone can make sense of it all. Of course, there in lies the charm of Maddin's films, which are consistently akin to a fevered dream, where logic is kicked to the curb and unchecked fantasy is given the wheel, navigating without a roadmap.
Johann, Grigorss, and Karla all suffer in a way that recalls the ancient Greek tragedies and myths about Oedipus and Electra, and even Shakespeare's "Hamlet". In Johann's case, it is manifested by sexual repression, but in Grigorss, it is in the way that he begins to see himself as an avenger of injustice, even though he is really driven by his own passions. Grigorss harbored affections for Karla, which he only shares with her after his brother's suicide. He is chosen to be a butler at the Count's mansion, but shortly after beginning there, the Count chooses to make him his adopted heir, on the basis that his mother has once again fallen back in love with him. Grigorss sees his mother's affections for the Count as a betrayal of his father, and instead challenges the Count to a duel. He becomes a cold, even sinister figure, convinced that doing what is "right" in his eyes is necessary, no matter who is harmed in the process. During the frigid knife fight, the glint of the dawning sun reflects on Grigorss's blade, a convention that would feel more at home when depicting a cold-blooded murderer than a righteous hero. Grigorss remains a fool after he is cast out by his mother and the community, since the subtly manipulative Karla confides to him that her father raped her as a child, and that she now wants him to kill Herr Trotta for her. Her plan is to take him out into the mountains by sleigh (in a fashion somewhat similar to Double Indemnity), where the crack of a pistol being fired will summon an avalanche to claim his life. But even Karla, despite what she professes happened to her, still finds herself attracted to her father, and joins him in death. It becomes clear that her "vengeance" has less to do with the evil he (may have) committed than a jealousy she harbors for the affections he has begun showering on her younger sister, Sigleinde (Katya Gardner). Ultimately, all of these twisted desires in this blossoming generation bring ruin to the remote village of Tolzbad, leaving a wake of corpses behind. Maybe they too will remain preserved in the deep snow, appearing alive and happy, except that there will be no descendants of theirs to find them...their hearts have already been "pierced" by despair and sorrow.
Recommended for: Fans of an experimental and unusual movie about Oedipal complexes, avalanches, and an excess of rules and presumed safeguards that lead only to more suffering. For those looking for a mix of tragedy and comedy with a one-of-a-kind vintage cinema aesthetic, the movies of Guy Maddin--including Careful--should scratch that itch.
The movie is filled with tragicomic moments like a baby wearing an eyepatch (lost to a brooch pin) who loses his other eye as an adult due to a cuckoo clock. (This man turns out to be the late pater familias of Johann, etc.) Subsequently, he plummets to his death from a mountain because he is now totally blind, wearing two eyepatches. That same father (Michael O'Sullivan) appears before the mute (and apparently paralyzed) Franz as a ghost and warns him of Johann's plan to seduce their mother, ignorant of the fact that Franz can do nothing about it, because he doesn't see that he's disabled. It doesn't help that Franz has been exiled to the attic by his mother, who holds a grudge against him for no better reason than that she conceived him when she was not thinking about her erstwhile love, the reclusive Count Knotkers (Paul Cox). The Count is all but worshiped in town and lives in his opulent mansion, while the rest of Tolzbad toils in the mines or goes to "butler school" solely to serve him. People caught in avalanches are discovered decades later by their children and widows, looking as lifelike as they did at the time of their passing. So affecting was this discovery, Careful presents, that to avoid any possibility of these popsicle people returning to life, the dead now had an iron nail driven into their hearts--as if someone truly believed that they might be something like vampires; and, of course, the whole town goes along with the madness. If you're like me, as I write these strange descriptions of the setting and its characters, and the outright weirdness they embody, you're scratching your head wondering how anyone can make sense of it all. Of course, there in lies the charm of Maddin's films, which are consistently akin to a fevered dream, where logic is kicked to the curb and unchecked fantasy is given the wheel, navigating without a roadmap.
Johann, Grigorss, and Karla all suffer in a way that recalls the ancient Greek tragedies and myths about Oedipus and Electra, and even Shakespeare's "Hamlet". In Johann's case, it is manifested by sexual repression, but in Grigorss, it is in the way that he begins to see himself as an avenger of injustice, even though he is really driven by his own passions. Grigorss harbored affections for Karla, which he only shares with her after his brother's suicide. He is chosen to be a butler at the Count's mansion, but shortly after beginning there, the Count chooses to make him his adopted heir, on the basis that his mother has once again fallen back in love with him. Grigorss sees his mother's affections for the Count as a betrayal of his father, and instead challenges the Count to a duel. He becomes a cold, even sinister figure, convinced that doing what is "right" in his eyes is necessary, no matter who is harmed in the process. During the frigid knife fight, the glint of the dawning sun reflects on Grigorss's blade, a convention that would feel more at home when depicting a cold-blooded murderer than a righteous hero. Grigorss remains a fool after he is cast out by his mother and the community, since the subtly manipulative Karla confides to him that her father raped her as a child, and that she now wants him to kill Herr Trotta for her. Her plan is to take him out into the mountains by sleigh (in a fashion somewhat similar to Double Indemnity), where the crack of a pistol being fired will summon an avalanche to claim his life. But even Karla, despite what she professes happened to her, still finds herself attracted to her father, and joins him in death. It becomes clear that her "vengeance" has less to do with the evil he (may have) committed than a jealousy she harbors for the affections he has begun showering on her younger sister, Sigleinde (Katya Gardner). Ultimately, all of these twisted desires in this blossoming generation bring ruin to the remote village of Tolzbad, leaving a wake of corpses behind. Maybe they too will remain preserved in the deep snow, appearing alive and happy, except that there will be no descendants of theirs to find them...their hearts have already been "pierced" by despair and sorrow.
Recommended for: Fans of an experimental and unusual movie about Oedipal complexes, avalanches, and an excess of rules and presumed safeguards that lead only to more suffering. For those looking for a mix of tragedy and comedy with a one-of-a-kind vintage cinema aesthetic, the movies of Guy Maddin--including Careful--should scratch that itch.