Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands

Well, this is quite probably one of the most uncategorisable films I've seen - you couldn't possibly call it a comedy, with its beauty salons that moonlight as abortion clinics/brothels, and its disturbingly self-lacerating portrait of the director as a cowardly lecher and cold-blooded murderer. But parts of it are hilarious. Go figure. In brief, the plot concerns Guy Maddin, hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, who takes his pregnant girlfriend to the above-mentioned clinic for a termination and then leaves her (literally in the middle of the procedure) for the brothel-keeper's beautiful daughter, played with incandescent and slightly scary intensity by Melissa Dionisio (that surely cant be her real name, can it?) only to discover that she can't allow herself to be touched by a man's hands (an uncharacteristically direct quote from Lon Chaney's 'The Unknown') until her father's murder has been avenged. And then she produced the jar in which she keeps, preserved, her father's hands... After that we get a twist on that old chestnut 'The Hands of Orlac', combined with a surprisingly explicit dose of sexual excess and weird psychology, as young Guy ends up in deep trouble of every sort imaginable, through his own inability to control his lusts. Told in ten chapters of six minutes apiece, this was intended as a gallery installation but it works just fine as a movie. As long as you don't mind a regular dose of jawdropping strangeness and a large splash of shocking, unfathomable directorial masochism.

It's not in Guy Maddin to make what Hollywood people would call a "normal" movie. Armed with 8mm cameras, loads of lights, sound effects (if not actual sound equipment), and a mind like a steel Dziga-Vertov trap marinated in Winnipeg and sex and murder, he makes movies the way he damn well pleases to do them, which usually are done like super-kinetic, libido-charged fever dreams that come to represent a kind of consciousness that could be misconstrued as a music video if not for the fact that it's a 1920's silent film about revenge-plotting women and blue hands ala Evil Dead that kill innocent victims while hockey is always a major subject (and, sometimes, with players in full wax museum mold).

It might not always make sense- and by this I mean relatively to some of Maddin's best and strangest like Brand Upon the Brain! and The Saddestmusic in the World- but it's never less than boring and always more than enough for the open-minded. And by this I mean open-minded enough to find oneself in the horror-movie world of a hockey player named Guy Maddin (yeah, not the first time and wont be the last the director has a character named by himself), who goes through a psycho-sexual-homicidal journey through a pair of blue hands which belong to a devious girl's father. They aren't actually his hands put on his, however, they're just painted blue. But there's an effect that comes with this: the hands kill ala Evil Dead without Maddin really wanting to. So come a series of events involving wax-painted hockey players who can come to life, an abortionist that works out of a beauty parlor, another woman who cant stand how Maddin waxes her legs, and, yes, plenty of frenetic Canadian Hockey.

That's what it's aboot, so to speak, but there's more, much more, particularly in Maddin's 10-chapter set-up, and featuring Beethoven's 7th among other classical selections (frankly I enjoyed the 7th in Saddest Music more, but this is even crazier, which helps). Everything moves at such a pace and clip you wont know what stops and goes. But Maddin's mind works wonders as a master of his craft and at relaying his own personality and life experiences in the framework of what is essentially a really demented B-movie. It's like with Jodorowsky: he makes movies with his you-know-what as opposed to his head. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Understand that I'm getting a bit tired of people comparing every strange movie that comes along to a David Lynch film too. Unfortunately, Lynch is the norm and just about one of the most accessible strange filmmakers out there, so sometimes the comparison is needed for a starting point, like in this case.

This movie is, roughly speaking, the story of a swinging hockey player who gets entrapped in a bunch of relationships, including most prominently one with a scarred daughter who wants her father's death revenged. Her father's killer? Her mother. It includes but is not limited to perverse sexuality, weird psychoses, and severed arms.

It's shot in black and white and is a silent film, which creates for it a sort of removed surreality/abstractness which is, honestly, reminiscent of Eraserhead and Lynch's Lumiere and Company short.

What makes it Maddin's, though, is the use of imagery from his childhood (the barbershop, the hockey players, etc.) set to a blatant sexuality which goes beyond just being blatant but enforces it: you see the sexual image, and then the words follow saying exactly what you were thinking. No more subtlety and deranged fetishes, this is straight-forward Freud and primal scene.

Because of this, this film as a whole remains true to itself and never lets go of its own private Universe, one that we could never live in and yet, terribly, can relate to, figure out, and eventually even understand.

Beyond that, there's not much that can be talked about this movie besides the fact that it there's no common approach to it. It has no genre (besides maybe Silent film) and is disconcerting, requiring a certain level of viewer interaction that most movies don't ask for. For fans of strange and insane cinema, it's great; for anybody looking to be entertained, this is most definitely not for you.

--PolarisDiB

didn't think i wanted to watch this when it came on in the wee hours on sundance 2 nights ago; i needed some sleep. after 90 seconds, i was hooked. i was so stunned by this film that all i could think was, 'clearly a work of genius,', 'the heck with sleep,' and, 'why didn't i set the VCR?!'

cinema and i go way back, way even before college in Paris and the cinematheque in the 1970s, and i rated it a 9, the only time i've ever given my own highest rating to a film here. although Mr. Maddin might not appreciate the comparison, i think his body of work shows a creative mind in league with Woody Allen, in terms of switching genres and excelling most of the time. Billy Wilder is another example that comes to mind. bold risk-takers, all. i just wish i were better to articulate my thoughts on this.

bravo!

By turns a dark comedy, horror film, Gothic love story, and heartbreaking drama, "Cowards Bend the Knee" is a magnificent carnival of the bizarre. It carries the typical Guy Maddin style, which imitates silent, experimental cinema-normally mixing it with dark humor and surprising poetry. In this film, Maddin uses his style to the best of its ability by a forming a unique, genre bending masterwork of the avant garde. Mixing slapstick, sex, and scares Maddin creates an otherworldly and wholly surreal experience around a wacky plot that involves revenge, decapitated hands, hockey, abortion, and a fake breast.

Sounds weird, right? Well, it is. It really, really is.

...and for fans of weird, surreal cinema it's a real treasure. I found myself laughing and shaking during this wild feast for the eyes. It has its moments of disorientation and confusion, but within those moments lies a deep and subtle beauty. Guy Maddin is similar to Jim Jarmusch because his films are like cinematic poems, but while Jarmusch seems to be making beat poetry, Maddin makes completely off the wall, experimental poetry!