Maybe if you've never seen a Guy Maddin movie, you might find this original, but its entire aesthetic is simply ripping him off. Unfortunately, it's far more pretentious than anything he did and all the attempts at comedy fall flat. The logical conclusion to something like this is that it's all a con on the grant organizations that funded it. You can see the application form "an examination of the myth of Canadian identity and history, a look at the battle between french and english Canada, an exploration of a national figure,etc" but it's all BS. Movies like this could not exist without a checklist system and people who don't care about the final product. This is a painful experience to sit through and imagining the director laughing at the government he dislikes having paid his rent for a year only makes it intermitable.
Review of The Twentieth Century
