The Twentieth Century is a wild and entertaining Heritage Minute from hell

What do William Lyon Mackenzie King, TIFF's Midnight Madness programme, and a shoe fetish have in common? Matthew Rankin. 

The Winnipeg-born filmmaker's feature film debut, The Twentieth Century, had its world premiere at TIFF this Tuesday in the ultimate section for something this absurd and at times a little grotesque. The film takes a wholly unconventional approach to what we might consider more traditional Canadian cinema.  

"I'm excited about Midnight Madness," Rankin said "because it's a crowd that kind of knows what to expect a little bit."

"It's kind of pushing the envelope," he added, "I've never really made things that I would think of as like genre films, but I totally get how this one could fit into that world."

The film follows a fictional account of William Lyon Mackenzie King's early life before becoming Canada's 10th prime minister in 1921. 

Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) has his hopes dashed during the final competition that will put him in line to become Canada's next prime minister, a destiny predicted by his bed-ridden mother (played by Louis Negin). 

Humiliated and ashamed, he seeks comfort in unconventional means of gratification (remember that shoe fetish we mentioned earlier?) while trying to regain his footing in the political race and earn the love of the woman of his mother's dreams. 

The Twentieth Century is loaded with absurd imagery reminiscent of animated Monty Python sketches coupled with the work of Guy Maddin. That includes an ejaculating cactus that serves as a totem of Mackenzie King's repressed sexual desires. 

Pair that with a few creative anti-masturbatory devices, a tyrannical Governor General (Seán Cullen), and ice maze races and the whole thing feels like a Heritage Minute from hell, albeit a hugely entertaining one. 

The whole concept came about from Rankin's love of diaries. Having kept diaries his whole life, he was fascinated by those of famous figures. Mackenzie King, a compulsive diarist, was one such figure that caught his eye. 

Having kept detailed diaries from 1893 until three days before his death in 1950, to say there was a wealth of intimate information would be an understatement. Mackenzie King's diaries comprise over 50,000 pages of text and, when stacked on top of one another, span more than seven metres in length.   

"I started to read it when I was in university just purely out of my own interest," Rankin says. "I don't remember exactly what led me to start reading it. But I remember spending hours and hours in the microfiche and just consuming his early life as a young person and kind of falling asleep while I was reading." 

Rankin would doze off after having devoured the material for hours at a time and have crazy dreams about it. He couldn't quite separate what was real from the dream, what had just visualized directly from the pages of Mackenzie King's thoughts and what was his mind taking the material and making something new, something a little perverse out of it. 

As a result of that process, he says, "I began to feel very connected to some of his more vulnerable qualities. And it reminded me a lot of reading my own diary when I was reading his sort of maudlin outbursts and romantic confusions and, you know, vainglorious, Napoleonic visions of the future. I couldn't help but think of my own diary as a young person." 

He felt connected to Mackenzie King and the material of his life, deciding it all felt like a movie, one that absolutely needed to be made. 

The film, while absurd, is also a stinging satire, actively poking fun at Canadians with a loving grin while also pointing a bit of a critical finger. From referring to the Canadian flag as "the disappointment" to portraying the Quebecois as loving, mustachioed hippies against Ontario's Big Brother-esque Party, nothing is off-limits and the kid gloves are off.  

"I like satire that stings a little bit," he tells me.
 
"And I feel like that's kind of missing in our culture now. I feel like since Mordecai Richler is no longer among us, we don't have any rascals anymore." Rankin certainly plays his rascal hand with The Twentieth Century, every dig and quip lovingly delivered with acrid wit. 

"I did wonder if maybe it was, you know, nauseatingly Canadian, to the point that only Canadians would watch it and get it," Rankin adds of the film. Many of the jokes, for instance, may go over the heads of non-Canadians. Then again, maybe that's not worth being concerned about? Having lived and worked in Quebec for a number of years, Rankin points to the audacity of Quebec cinema to be unabashedly and unapologetically itself, regardless of who else may watch or understand it outside of the province, let alone the country. He points to the work of Xavier Dolan, where films like Mommy (2014) were subtitled in France because of the specificity of the language in Quebec.

With U.S. distribution rights acquired by Oscilloscope, The Twentieth Century will be making its way to non-Canadian audiences, but Rankin's not concerned as to whether or not international audiences will get the jokes.

"People like to laugh at Canada," he says, adding "Canada is sort of the object of condescension for people. So it's kind of fun. But that's part of the pleasure of watching a movie, isn't it? To be able to enter a different world that you don't know about and see what's strange and interesting about it, right? That is the pleasure of cinema."