Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

Brand Upon the Brain! is a bore. (Yes, there is an exclamation point in the title.) I certainly like that it's very radical, both in its narrative and its presentation. It's a silent film with live orchestral accompaniment, and the film was made recently. It's not a revival of a 100-year-old film. But I thought the film itself was just awful. I'd love to see a talented artist attempt the kind of project Guy Maddin has envisioned. Maddin himself is not up to the task. The fact that he succeeded in getting artists like Isabella Rosellini to work with him is puzzling in the extreme. She's one of the live narrators in the NYC production. (The night I saw it, however, Joie Lee was the narrator -- Spike Lee's sister.) The film is a bizarre Freudian psychodrama that plays like a twisted autobiography of the subconscious. A boy named Guy lives on a remote island with his parents and sister, and they run an orphanage. There are no other adults on the island save for his parents. His parents are psychos. The mother is the more fully developed character. She is a domineering, omnipotent, omniscient nutcase. She sits in a lighthouse and surveys everything on the island, controlling her two children through a kind of telepathy. To (over)emphasize her vampiric qualities, the film has her sucking "nectar" from the orphans, which she gets by drilling holes in the kids' heads. Whenever she gets a fix of nectar, she becomes younger in appearance. But when she flies into a rage, which usually occurs at times when her children get sexually aroused, she becomes old again. In addition to the classic (hackneyed) Freudian drama of the overpowering mother, we get the classic (hackneyed) Freudian drama of the boy who has confusing crushes on both boys and girls. The film is saturated with bisexual arousal, which I suppose is Guy Maddin's version of polymorphous perversity. I found it tiresome, predictable and repetitious and devoid of all genuine arousal. Maddin is particularly fond of filming his male actors naked from both the front and the back. I haven't seen this many male buttocks and penises since the last time I saw porn. I certainly don't look down my nose at Freudian psychodrama or bisexuality. In fact I'm very interested in such themes. My problem is that Brand Upon the Brain! is such a banal, predictable version of it. I get the feeling that Maddin has been making the same films since the 1950s and hasn't grown in the slightest since the days of his youth. I'm happy that avant-garde projects like this are getting made in 2007 and publicly shown. I'm just sad that this one was so mediocre. It gives the avant-garde a bad name. One side note about the orchestral accompaniment: there is a male singer who does a couple of short arias in a soprano voice during the film. What's very, very strange is that the marketing material claims this man is a castrati. If you know anything about opera, you know that in Europe some boys used to be castrated so that they could keep their angelic voices into adulthood. The practice waned about 300 years ago, but Guy Maddin appears to want to revive it. I'm sure the man wasn't really a castrati. There's a new trend in opera for men to cultivate a soprano voice. I'm sure this man is one of those "counter-tenors," as they're known. For this film team to claim that they have found a castrated man in 2007 is yet another example of how this is not much more than a circus parading as serious art. I feel like I was hoodwinked into spending $40 on this. Yes, the admission was $40.