TIFF Report: My Dad Is 100 Years Old Review

Guy Maddin's My Dad Is 100 Years Old is a curious beast. Written by Isabella Rossellini as a tribute to her dead father – acclaimed Italian film maker Roberto Rossellini – on the hundredth anniversary of his birth the film also stars Rossellini in every role other than the large belly that speaks for her father himself. It is an intensely personal film, the sort that rarely gets made and is even more rarely screened in public, and one that is clearly Rossellini's through and through. However the instantly recognizable Maddin techniques are in full effect making this also a Maddin film through and through. How the two talents meet and intermingle makes for a fascinating viewing experience …

Rossellini's script reads as part childhood memoir, part confessional, part letter to a dead parent and part defense of her father's work. At times she speaks directly to the camera as herself, at others narrates in the third person, at still others appears as an array of her father's contemporaries – Selznick, Hitchcock, Fellini and Chaplin – for an imaginary dialogue between the famous film makers over the nature and purpose of cinema. She even makes an appearance as her own mother. Rossellini truly lays herself bare here, exposing her longing for her dead father and the confused and conflicting emotions attached to any parent.

On the surface Maddin seems an odd choice for this sort of work but he was, nevertheless, hand picked by Rossellini to man the cameras. Rossellini's father, the man she is paying tribute to, was a man famous for his hatred of artifice in film, a fact that is brought up repeatedly throughout. Maddin, on the other hand, is internationally known precisely because of his love for artifice, his careful reconstruction of 1930's expressionism, his hand cranked cameras and Vaseline smudged lenses. There's an immediate and obvious conflict between the director and the subject of his work, one that is directly addressed in one very funny aside, but the thinking makes sense with a bit of thought. As much as this sets out to be a film about Rossellini's father it ends up being, as such things must, at least as much about her memory of her father and memory is an elusive, ever changing thing. Who better to capture the shifting shape of a memory, who better to try and capture a ghost, than Maddin a man who has spent his career capturing images of decades gone by.

Beautifully shot from a sincere and heartfelt script My Dad Is 100 Years Old is the sort of film that could easily have descended into syrupy self absorption. Instead you can only find yourself wishing there was more.