EYE WEEKLY Review Nov. 9, 2006

JASON ANDERSON

RENDEZVOUS WITH MADNESS

The most noteworthy films at Rendezvous With Madness allow viewers to travel to the depths of addiction and the heights of delusion - thankfully, these are temporary round trips rather than permanent vacations. From Nov. 9 to 18 at the Workman Theatre, the festival - which has been working hard to state the facts and debunk the myths of addiction and mental illness since 1987 - offers another well-curated program that includes several Toronto premieres and a short retrospective of works by Guy Maddin, the country's foremost purveyor of cinematic delirium.

Another Canadian maverick provides the most striking of the fest's many examinations of addictive behaviours. Beautifully rendered in the hand-developed and coloured film stock beloved by its creator, Toronto's Steve Sanguedolce, Dead Time (***; Nov. 13, 9:30pm) charts the experiences of four hard-living individuals who use drugs to quell the emotional turmoil caused by childhood abuse. Though its stark imagery and diaristic candour place the film in the squalid canon of junkie cinema, Sanguedolce moves beyond the business of getting and shooting drugs to explore such subjects as the protocols of prison life and the redemptive possibilities of art.

It's food rather than smack that obsesses the very gaunt women in Thin (****; Nov. 12, 7:30pm), Lauren Greenfield's unsettling documentary on several patients in a Florida eating-disorder clinic. If you missed it at Hot Docs, Rendezvous With Madness provides another opportunity to see one of the year's most powerful non-fiction films.

The fest also includes Toronto premieres of two American indie features that adopt the askew perspectives of their protagonists. The 4th Dimension (***; Nov. 15, 7:30pm) is a puzzling but effectively creepy tale of a clock repairman whose obsessive-compulsive disorder may have freed him from the conventional constraints of time and space. As for the subject of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (***; Nov. 14, 7:30pm) - a brave and bewildering screen adaptation of a German judge's infamous, proto-Freudian account of his mental breakdown, originally published in 1903 - he is convinced that the rays of the sun help him communicate with God in the big guy's special "nerve language." Before long, this poor soul is rouging his cheeks, making a dress of his bedsheets and awaiting a new act of divine procreation. Delusions of grandeur don't come any grander.