The Twentieth Century

This biographical film about the formative years of the most important Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, is impressive in how it essentially sets out on a path that is anything but standard. Instead of a credible retro setting and fidelity to facts, it gives viewers an insanely absurd dive into a dreamlike subconsciousness shot in a style inspired by German expressionism and other avant-garde trends from the early days of cinema and beyond, where surreal symbolism is melded with manifested Freudian anxieties. Some domestic conservative viewers may find The Twentieth Century to be a tasteless iconoclastic provocation. Despite its seeming randomness, however, it is a surprisingly conceptual work that, with its deviation from the norm and the crackpot nature of individual scenes, leads viewers to start finding out the facts about the central historic figure and the whole phantasmagorically depicted time for themselves. Not only does this film provide such impetus for self-study that the creators of conventional biographical dramas could only dream about, but it also shows that WLMK was a rather bizarre personality, despite his public image. (05.01.2021)