His unique film,The Forbidden Room, features amnesiac chanteuses, and a jungle vampire and tormented buttock obsessives. So business as normal,then, for the cult auteurApart from the fact that the action begins underwater – in a submarine facing certain doom – Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room is something of an underground film. All the Canadian directors films are, or in a sense. They’re made beyond the mainstream of art cinema,usually on scrimp-and-save budgets, and display the exalted amateur obsessiveness that marks the true outsider film-maker. And Maddins work has another quintessentially underground quality: the sense that he’s mining the unconscious not only of his perverse psyche but of cinema itself.
The Forbidden Room is the culmination of the 59-year-primitive’s 30-year career that began when Maddin would produce eerie pastiches of silent-era cinema in his mother’s primitive hair salon, or part of his family’s Winnipeg home. With their DIY trompe l’oeil props,his early films, such as Tales From the Gimli Hospital, and mixed Maddin’s film obsessions with skewed humour and local Manitoba lore. They led him to set up a career as a specialist in the exotically witty: later films include The Saddest Music in the World (2003),from a script by Kazuo Ishiguro, starring Isabella Rossellini as a brewery magnate whose glass legs are filled with beer.
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Source: theguardian.com