DAY 3: Sunday, March 11
After a late start, I made it to the Alamo Drafthouse Theater in south Austin for a screening of Canadian auteur Guy Maddin's latest film, Keyhole. Like all of his films (as far as I'm aware), it's in black-and-white and evocative of prewar movies in many other ways. Described by Maddin as a "gangsters and ghosts" picture that somehow evolved into an autobiography of a house, Keyhole begins in the living room of a family home where a band of local miscreants are staging a hold-up of various civilians.
Although this ambiguous criminal intrigue continues throughout the film, it mostly becomes the genre-formula backbone for a Freudian dreamscape portrait of Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric) and his eccentric family. Patric is a strange choice for a patriarch in a Guy Maddin movie, but perhaps that is exactly the point. He's the straight man to his loopy wife, Hyacinth (the great Isabella Rossellini), and their kids. Everything in the house is as wacky as can be, from the poster bed in which Hyacinth camps out with her father-in-law and an Asian man in chains to the ways in which Manners plays with his father's inventions. Ulysses seems just to want to wake up from this out-of-control dream.
