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Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr) is the top hockey player of the Winnipeg
Maroons, but when knocked over the head by an adversary, he becomes
somewhat addled in the brain ... at exactly the worst moment in his life,
because this is the day his fiancée Veronica (Amy Stewart) has an
abortion - in of all places a brothel that is disguised as a beauty salon
by day ...
But while Doctor Fusi (Louis Negin) - also the physician of the Maroons
- performs the abortion on her, Guy runs off with Meta (Melissa Dionisio),
the daughter of brothel Madame Liliom (Tara Birtwhistle). And while
Veronica's abortion goes wrong and she dies - on the hockey field Guy
usually plays at -, Guy wants to have sex with Meta ... but she can't be
touched until the death of her father (Henry Mogatas) is avenged, who was
cowardly killed by Liliom and her lover Shaky (David Stuart Evans),
incidently the captain of Guy's hockey team and police captain.
And to really turn Guy into the vengeful killer she needs, Meta has
Doctor Fusi transplant her father's hands (which are blue because he was a
hairdresser and the dye would stick to his hands) on Guy. Only Doc Fusi is
in no mood to perform a hand transplantation and instead only paints Guy's
hands blue - and somehow this does the trick, before long Guy has murdered
Shaky in front of a large audience during a hockey game against the Soviet
Union ... and Guy even gets away with it scot free. Later he goes to the
police to turn himself in, but officer Mo Mott (Mike Bell), Guy's best
friend, refuses to take Guy seriously - to an extent that Guy strangles Mo
Mott to death right at the police station ... but nobody seems to have
noticed.
Later, Guy finds himeslf alone with Liliom, and when he suddenly
remembers Veronica's abortion and death, he kills her, too.
In the meantime though, a few other developments ahve taken plance:
Veronica has somehow returned as a ghost and now works as the new girl
at the beauty salon, and soon enough, Guy falls for the new girl and they
spend the night together. This again makes Meta furious, and after Guy has
murdered Liliom, she asks for her father's hands back, and this time
around, Doc Fusi does not hesitate to hack 'em off ... only he doesn't
give Guy any new hands ...
Even without hands, Guy continues to play hockey, but then he learns
that the new girl - Veronica - has started an affair with his own father
(Victor Cowie), and he confronts them both in a forgotten wax museum (that
is curiously enough positioned above the hockey field), and calls upon the
wax figures - all portraying famous hockey players - to help him ... but
somehow the wax figures turn against him and confront him on a catwalk
directly above the hockey field ... which is when Meta enters the scene
and recognizes her dead dad in one of the figures. She wants to throw
herself into his arms, but since he has no hands and is thus unable to
catch her, she falls off the catwalk and onto the hockey field to her
death, at exactly the same spot Veronica died ...
A year later: Guy, the handless coward, has found his place among the
wax figures - all like him handless cowards ...
Wow. Even by Guy Maddin's standards, this is wild. It's pretty much a
clash of everything you wouldn't expect: early silent filmmaking and
avantgarde cinema, kitsch and surrealism, oedipal melodrama and
in-your-face horror, high art and bathroom humour ... and somehow, thanks
to Guy Maddin's genius, it not only works, it's also entertaining. It's
just darn unusual, it invites the viewer into a world where fake hand
transplantations, wax figures coming to life, ghosts having affairs with
humans, sport announcers fondling ice breasts and abortion clinics
disguised as brothels disguised as beauty salons make perfect sense. In a
word, this is the world of Guy Maddin ... and even for him, this film is
unusual.
Recommendation.
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