Cowards Bend the Knee

Jam-packed with enough kinetically photographed action to seem like a never-ending cliffhanger, Guy Maddin's tremendous "Cowards Bend the Knee" is a Feuillade serial ultra-condensed and blenderised, as ghostwritten by Euripides. If fiction is sometimes barely disguised autobiography, Cowards is its mirror image, twisted and poisoned wish-fulfillment: the mythomaniacal Maddin casts 'himself' (actually, Darcy Fehr) as a hockey sniper made lily-livered by mother and daughter femme fatales, and resurrects his father as the team's radio broadcaster and his own romantic antagonist. Set in a shadow-suffused hockey arena and a Mabuse-like beauty salon-slash-abortion clinic lined with two-way mirrors, the plot drips with the Grecian formula, as sordid family secrets spawn unintentional murder most foul... Cowards demands serious consideration as a major work of art by Canada's most self-deluded cinephile.