sexual repression.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Careful is Winnipeg writer-director Guy Maddin’s (”Tales from the
Gimli Hospital”/”Archangel”) uniquely bizarre campy parody of the
German expressionist silents such as “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” and “Nosferatu.”
It’s a low budget indie shot in the mode of those early German films with
hand-tinted color sequences, inter-titles, and heavy use of melodramatic
symbolism. Maddin creates from a story by George Toles a weirdly amusing
parable of sexual repression, which Maddin declared as a pro-repression
film. It’s an intriguing one-of-a-kind, over-the-top, visually dazzling
film that aims to put a lost age of innocence under its microscope with
scenes that include rape, incest, a deformed child who doesn’t speak kept
in the attic, a blind ghost warning of doom and unrequited love.
It’s set in the remote 19th-century Alpine mountain village of Tolzbad,
where children are warned to always be careful by their elders because
every sound they make could trigger an avalanche. The vocal cords of animals
are slit to stop them from making any unnecessary sounds. Everyone in this
puritanical repressed village speaks in whispers and frets about unknown
fears. There are other warnings given to the villagers such as “Never hold
a baby’s face near an open pin,” “Never gamble with life” and “Don’t talk
to strangers.”
The widowed mother of three sons, Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska), is
resentful that she couldn’t marry the man she loved, Count Knotkers (Paul
Cox), and married instead a man she couldn’t stand (Michael O’Sullivan),
blinded as a baby when placed too close to a pin and later his other eye
is taken when he was too close to a cuckoo clock, who now haunts her as
a blind ghost as he’s in charge of raising his first-born son Franz (Vince
Rimmer). Franz is detested by mom and kept in the attic, while her other
two sons, Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) and Johann (Brent Neale), she adores
because during conception she thought only of the count. The two loved
ones attend a butler training school, but after Johann is granted permission
to marry Klara (Sarah Neville) by her poor scientist father (Victor Cowie),
he has an erotic dream and becomes so sexually fixated on his mother that
he jumps to his death off the mountain–called an accidental death to relieve
the family of further strain. Grigorss after he graduates from the butler
school goes to work for the hermit Count Knotkers in his castle. Since
the count’s beloved mother died, he now asks Zenaida to marry him and promotes
Grigorss as his own son and presents him with a title. The twisted Grigorss
doesn’t accept this and challenges the count to a duel. Meanwhile an impoverished
Klara is forced to work in the mines, where only women clad in bloomers
work, while her sister Sigleinde (Katya Gardner) refuses to get her hands
dirty with work and lives a fanciful dirt-free life.
It leads to outbursts of Oedipal angst, sibling rivalry, loss of
sanity and even murder–an emotional avalanche. Though not suited for everyone’s
taste, it overwhelms the senses with its droll wit and magificent cheesy
sets drenched in old-time blue monochrome tints.