Wisconsin Film Festival 2012: Keyhole

While I know of Guy Maddin, last night's screening of Keyhole was my first experience with his work and it was a doozy.

While it was shot in color, the movie is in glorious black & white courtesy of cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke. This stylistic choice evokes the movies of yore but so do the characters - they are right out of a 1940s noir picture. A group of gangsters shoot their way into an abandoned house that is surrounded by police. They're in the employ of a gentleman curiously named Ulysses who wanders in through a back door soon after. With him is Denny, a pretty young woman that he apparently saved from drowning. Denny is blind making her the Tiresias of this Homeric tale.

The house is haunted. Some ghosts scream as they walk the halls or are silent as they scrub a floor for eternity. But it is the ghost of Ulysses' wife, Hyacinth, that is most important. She resides upstairs with her elderly father who is chained to the bed completely naked and is occasionally visited by Chang, her lover. Ulysses takes Denny and a young man bound to a chair and gagged on an odyssey through the house so he can get back to Hyacinth.

At the door of each room Ulysses looks through the keyhole and speaks to his dead wife. He pulls a lock of hair from the same before entering. Denny is able to see the ghosts and the sordid events of the past that echo within the walls and her vision allows Ulysses to see them as well. At the same time Hyacinth's father taunts Ulysses with exaggerated cries of “Remember, Ulysses. Remember!" that would be right at home in a Hammer film. As the trio meander from room to room, we discover that Denny wasn't exactly saved from drowning but rather she is still in media res, frequently losing her breath and needing to rest. At one point she dies and her naked body is lying on a table. Our hero and a doctor examine her pubic area intently. Ulysses reaches out to touch her pubic hair and finds that his fingers have gold dust on them. He remarks something along the lines of, "Just like the Greeks. They used lamb's wool to pan for gold."

And the young man in the chair turns out to be Manners, Ulysses' youngest son. Along with Hyacinth, the rest of Ulysses' children are only seen as ghosts or in flashbacks. Another son is masturbating underneath the stairs and the third, we find out, was killed by one of the gangsters in Ulysses' employ. It is worth noting that it is the daughter is shown in the only scene in color.

Why this is worth noting, I'm not totally sure because Keyhole is about as opaque as David Lynch's Inland Empire. I presume Maddin is interested in memory and remembering so I appreciated his use of black & white and his appropriation of old film noir. A Jungian would probably read a lot into this movie. As it stands, I found Keyhole to be a weird and wonderful oneiric odyssey.