'My Winnipeg'

Rating:

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

June 13, 2008

The Canadian prairie city of Winnipeg is sleepy, precociously psychic and shamefully in need of an NHL team, all subjects that are addressed in Guy Maddin's supposed nonfiction portrait of his birthplace. But this rather unreliable documentary is merely a launchpad for yet another of Maddin's giddy, Gothic unguided missiles, a movie that is as happily warped and enthusiastically disturbed as the rest of Maddin's eccentric cinema.

In addition to providing a brief and thoroughly suspect history of Winnipeg, Maddin re-creates the home of his boyhood - spent over his mother and aunt's beauty salon - where he casts actors as his family (including film noir legend Ann Savage as Mom) and proceeds to disinter his childhood.

Maddin's trip back in time is highly personal but totally accessible: His memories of watching "Ledgeman" - a television series in which a sensitive young man is driven out on the window ledge by his mother, and then talked back in, every day, for 50 years - may not be true. But many will understand the sentiments.

PLOT Filmmaker Guy Maddin’s rumination on his hometown, which he’d like to escape but knows he never will. (unrated)

CAST Ann Savage, Darcy Fehr, Amy Stewart.

LENGTH 1:20

PLAYING AT Lincoln Plaza and IFC Center, Manhattan

BOTTOM LINE Happy, Dopey and Doc: Nonfiction has never been so gleefully unhinged and hilarious.