# Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)

### reviewed by
Richard Scheib

    TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS

Canada. 1997. Director - Guy Maddin, Screenplay - George Toles, Producer - Ritchard Findlay, Photography - Michael Marshall, Music - John McCulloch, Production Design - Reginald Lebrie. Production Company - Marble Island Pictures. Nigel Whitmey [uncredited] (Peter Glahn), Pascale Bussieres (Juliana Kossel), R.H. Thomson (Dr Isaac Solti), Shelley Duval (Amelia Glahn), Alice Krige (Zephyr Eccles), Frank Gorshin (Cain Ball)

Plot: Just released from prison and returning to his home in the land of Mandragora where the sun never sets, Peter Glahn falls in love with the beautiful but mysterious Juliana Kossel. Upon his return Peter finds his ostrich farmer sister Amelia engaged in a bitter battle with her hired hand who expects to be deeded the title of her farm. Zephyr Eccles, who has been abandoned pregnant by her husband, falls for Peter and gives her wedding ring to the ice nymph so that she might have him. But then the object of Amelia's desire, the sinister Dr Solti, arrives with his fiancee - Juliana - whom he has really hypnotized and made speak words of love to Peter. This circle of frustrated desires all comes to a head at once.

Canada's Guy Maddin is often alikened to David Lynch. Such a comparison is not really accurate and is probably born more of the lack of anything else that Maddin's work can easily be easily compared to. Certainly Lynch and Maddin have weird cinema pegged out between them. But where Lynch's work has a dark obsessiveness tempered with a kind of cod deadpan banality, Maddin's is all cod deadpan banality - which is about the only real point of intersection that the two have. Maddin's work - `Tales from the Gimli Hospital' (1989), `Archangel' (1990), `Careful' (1992), and this - feels as though it takes place in alternate worlds that have been constructed as kitsch homages to lost styles of film-making. Maddin is particularly fond of German cinema with his films frequently evoking Expressionism (the ghost of Dr Caligari surely hangs over the character of Dr Solti here) and Heimat cinema. At the same time all of Maddin's stylistic evocations are run over with what sounds like the hysterical purple prose from a bad romantic novel.

`Twilight' is set in another Maddin world that seems to have emerged from some kind of demented Wagnerian opera. As always in a Maddin film, the world is created with a deliberate stagey artificiality - all the sets look like they have been built for the enchanted forest in a high-school pantomime. The dialogue is suitably inscrutable Maddin-esque prose - "We are naked under these clothes," lovers solemnly proclaim. Or "When an agreement is signed it is time to chop down the trees"; and after Alice Krige gives Nigel Whitmey a purple negligee to wear: "You can wear my clothes until doomsday but it won't make you any more of a woman, just less of a man." The story is an amusing rondeau of frustrated wants among the various characters. Here R.H. Thomson intoning with an amusingly solemn sotto voce gravitas makes a memorable impression as the sinister Svengali figure Solti. Although in the end `Twilight' never quite strikes one with either the same sublime combination of stylized weirdness and melodramatic banality that Maddin's marvellous `Careful' did - it's more of the same but slightly lesser. The film has Maddin's largest budget yet - only about $2.5 million would one believe - which allows him to shoot in colour for the first time and to employ name actors such as Shelley Duval and Alice Krige.

Reviewed at the 1998 Wellington International Film Festival Copyright Richard Scheib 1998

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