Crew
Director – Guy Maddin, Screenplay – Guy Maddin & George Toles, Story Suggested by John B. Harvie, Producer – Greg Klymkiw, Production Design – Dennis W. Smith. Production Company – Ordnance.
Cast
Kyle McCulloch (Lieutenant John Boles), Kathy Marycuka (Veronkha), Sarah Neville (Danchuk), Ari Cohen (Captain Philbin), Michael Gottli (Jannings), David Falkenberg (Geza), Margaret Anne McLeod (Baba), Michael O’Sullivan (Doctor), Victor Cowie (Sea Captain)
Plot
Winter 1919, three months after the end of the First World War. Canadian soldier Lieutenant John Boles arrives in Archangel, Russia. He is taken in and billeted by a family. There he aids them and disciplines the son Geza, while the wife Danchuk forms an attachment to him. They offer him an artificial leg to replace the one he lost. Boles sees another local girl Veronkha and immediately takes her to be Iris, the late love he believed was killed and thinks is now alive again. As Boles pursues Veronkha, she must also deal with Captain Philbin, the man she married before the war, only to find him carousing with a Bolshevik girl on their wedding night. However, Philbin suffers amnesia and forgets everything that has happened after his wedding day and she is forced to relive the day with him over and over.
Guy Maddin is a filmmaker who emerged from Winnipeg, Canada. After making several short films, Maddin made his appearance proper with Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), which gained reasonable word of mouth on the festival circuit. This allowed Maddin to obtain a bigger budget for the making of Archangel. Maddin subsequently went on to make other such films as Careful (1992), Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), The Saddest Music in the World (2003), Cowards Bend the Knee, or The Blue Hands (2003), Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), My Winnipeg (2007), Keyhole (2011), The Forbidden Room (2015), The Green Fog (2017) and as co-director of Rumours (2024). Maddin’s films come with a distinctive visual style – they homage silent movies, in particular German Expressionism – and use photography and set design to create a highly stylised, dream-like world. At the same time, they are surrealist films that play out with deliberately ridiculous melodrama and hilariously deadpan prose.
Archangel was Maddin’s second film. The style he was aiming to achieve is there – it is still embryonic in some places and is not quite as polished, but in other regards it is perfectly formed right out of the starting gate. There are all of Maddin’s familiar stylistic effects in place – the love of and homage to the stylistic effect of old movies from around the silent era with their black-and-white photography, the irising of the lens in and out to cut scenes, and often gauzed lens.
And there are the weirdly quirky plot devices that frequently turn up in Maddin films – the artificial leg(s) that became a feature of The Saddest Music in the World – “This is my father’s leg. I think he would want you to have it,” Sarah Neville tells Kyle McCulloch upon presenting it to him. Maddin’s films also come with absurdly purple dialogue that is played in complete straight-face by the cast to frequently hilarious effect. Lines like “Darling, there is a dead sparrow on the roof – a good omen for our marriage” or “Every time I kill someone in battle, I try to think of them as a rival for your affections.”
Maddin’s films also come with this melodrama – the plot here involves an amnesiac soldier returning to town waking up every day unable to remember anything past it being his wedding day and having to re-enact it; hero Kyle McCulloch finding the bride (Kathy Marycuka) to be a ringer for his lost love and believing that she has come back to life; and other assorted nonsense involving the missing limb, Bolsheviks and re-enactments of the War by a village that apparently hasn’t worked out that it has ended yet.
Maddin’s love of German Expressionism and its stylistic effect is most evident when it comes to the scenes with Kyle McCulloch and Sarah Neville and others making their way across the battlefield, which is represented by silhouettes of trees and crosses. You do get the impression that Archangel was made with limited budgetary resources, particularly when it came to hiring studio space – the cabin where the family live and the battlefield both look as though they were shot in confined areas. Certainly, Maddin, his production designer and lighting cameraman do marvellous things in making these come to life.
Trailer here