Winnipeg-born director Matthew Rankin has tried more than once to land a Heritage Minute.
But his pitches, including an “experimental dance film” about disgraced Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson, were just too strange, he guesses, for Historica Canada to indulge.
So he’s brought his own version to the 44th Toronto International Film Festival this year with his feature film debut "The Twentieth Century," a warped take on a young William Lyon Mackenzie King.
“It’s one part Canadian Heritage Minute and one part ayahuasca death trip,” he told CTNews.ca ahead of the festival, where the film has its world premiere Tuesday in the Midnight Madness program.
"The Twentieth Century," which stars “Workin' Moms” actor Dan Beirne as the future PM, is based on real people and incidents “fed through a very surreal prism,” said Rankin. Billed by TIFF as a “Heritage Minute from hell” and a “bizarro biopic,” it follows the early days of a young Mackenzie King through a series of humiliations as he hurtles toward top office.
The script is based on actual people and events chronicled in King’s own diaries and letters written between 1897 and 1902, when he was in his 20s. Some lines of dialogue are pulled directly from the original text. Otherwise events are “reprocessed,” said Rankin.
“I describe this movie as a nightmare that (Mackenzie King) might have had around 1899,” he said. “I spent a lot of time reading the diary. A lot of times I’d fall asleep while reading it. I’d wake up and I couldn’t remember exactly what I had dreamed or read. The script kind of emerged out of that.”
In one surreal sequence, Mackenzie King competes in a leadership contest involving ribbon cutting, “endurance waiting,” baby seal clubbing and urinating one’s name in the snow. Throughout the film, he struggles with a fetish for women’s footwear, which has an unsettling connection to a cactus.
The fetish is not fact. Instead, Rankin calls it a “transmogrification” of details, based on “repressed erotic feelings” identified in the diaries where Mackenzie King wrote of sinning and committing horrible acts, said Rankin. Words are crossed out and pages were ripped from the book. The theory among many historians is that Mackenzie King visited prostitutes, but that is unconfirmed. Rankin simply chose to go a different direction to fill in the blanks.
“It’s a question of ecstatic truth,” he said. “Historians draw that conclusion because it’s the most educated guess they could make. It does nonetheless remain a fiction and it remains an artistic operation. I am definitely riffing off of that. I am giving into the artistic workings of historical reconstruction.”
Fact or fiction, Rankin’s film is an uncommonly surreal, darkly comic depiction of Canada. He knows his brand of patriotism is not in line with Canadian-focused media such as Heritage Minutes and "Anne of Green Gables." That’s the way he likes it.
“The way that we often represent Canada is this comforting reassuring, vanilla ice cream image,” he said. “This is, in part, what the film is confronting.”
