The Heart of the World

Fans of Guy Maddin should check out this new short film. If you thought his previous short film Odilon Redon was an excellent film, The Heart Of The World tops it.

The pacing is frantic, the storyline is the classic love triangle that Guy loves working with, the setting is heavily influenced by Soviet imagery. Even the editing style is very similar to that of Eisenstein.

What also makes this film work very well is the accompanying Soviet music entitled Time, Forward.

Whereas Guy's recent longer narratives have failed (The Hands of Ida, and Twilight Of The Ice Nymphs), his shorts films just keep getting better and better.

Nikolai, a mortician, and Osip, an actor playing Christ in a play, are brothers in love with the same woman. Anna, a state scientist and said woman, is in love with both brothers and studies the Earth's core, the very heart of the world.

I loved every frame of this film from start to finish, and loved the way writer-director Guy Maddin smoothly blended a Soviet film theme with makeup and designs reminiscent of German expressionism (particularly "Metropolis"). Using the word "kino" was a nice touch to mix the two, as kino is the word for cinema in both Russia and Germany...

The hectic pace draws you in, and while the running time is short, it is enough for you to understand the world Maddin is working in and to know who Anna is. Perhaps I did not completely grasp the symbolism of the Christ figure or the phallic parts, but this in no way lessened my enjoyment.

The first time I saw this movie end, I knew I had to immediately watch it again. It moves so fast that you only get tantalizing hints of what actually happens with the first viewing, so you want to watch it again and again. The cinematography is nothing short of amazing, with homages to film greats and displaying visionary originality that earned it a top spot in so many critic's Top 10's.

Everything about this film, from the grainy textures to the the set and costumes, reflects Maddin's unstoppable freight train of weird and cool. Strong casting choices also made the movie much more than your average short, proving that five and a half minutes is plenty of time to tell an intricate and beautiful story. This will be a hard one to knock out of MY Top 5. Watch, rinse, repeat.

6 minutes of my movie viewing life. I was amazed at the emotional impact of this short, the music, editing, visuals and subject matter all combine to make this a masterpiece of cinema...and it is a black and white, silent film at that. Just as satisfying as INTOLERANCE. To some and maybe the casual viewer this may come across as a cheap and quickly thrown together film, but with repeated viewings, you can see the care and time that Maddin lavished on this production, the pace is frantic and actually leaves you gasping for breath...and thinking what did I just see! A highly recommended film and one to include in a library of important and significant works of art cinema.

As with all of Guy Maddin's films, "The Heart of the World" left me, well, speechless. I'm rarely insightful, usually articulate, but I can never write well about a Guy Maddin film. That Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a whole essay on this film is not surprising, but it does leave me in awe. A wacky narrative featuring the usual Maddin love triangle, this is six and a half minutes of pure joy. The genius of "The Heart of the World" isn't its wackiness or the technical and stylistic qualities of the film, it's that it's not a bit of showboating, but a fascinating experimental success- what Maddin has done is made a whole feature in six minutes. Most short films are short because that's how they were written, that's how much material the filmmakers had and wanted to make. "The Heart of the World" could have easily been a feature. In fact, it has a more interesting 'plot' than a couple of Maddin's actual features (especially "Brand Upon the Brain!" for me). Rosenbaum suggests this might be the world's first 'subliminal melodrama'. That's a better description than I could come up with. I watched the movie twice in a row but I have a feeling I'll be watching it many, many more times. I absolutely loved this film, but not enough to eclipse "Elimination Dance" as my favorite Canadian short, though "The Heart of the World" is almost unquestionably the greater accomplishment. I prefer Maddin's features "My Winnipeg" and "Careful" to this, but again, it's the staggering accomplishment of this film that makes it so worthy of awe. How many filmmakers have done montage better?