****1/2 (Tour-de-force)

“The Heart of the World” is at once quite simple and inordinately complex, stymieing most sensible attempts to dissect it. A story laid out in broad terms but filled with the grand tradition that proceeds it, it is a behemoth of small stature. Guy Maddin dares to use just six minutes to not only lay out the cinematic condition, but to wrap it in a tale of love, revenge, and sacrifice that becomes universal.

At its core, “The Heart of the World” is fashioned after propaganda films, and thus its most important goal is to induce feeling. In the traditional propaganda films it is most inspired by, these are patriotic feelings, but Maddin manages to enlarge and deepen them, retaining the pride while adding a clear emotional core in the three individuals that never distracts from the world-altering consequences. The narrative is both simple and ludicrous enough to work—a love triangle that reaches its fever pitch just as the end of the world (via a literal heart attack) arrives, only to be interrupted by a capitalist—and Maddin recognizes and adapts to how narratively restricting six minutes is. But he also finds time to insert the beautifully bizarre: a phallic embalming machine, strange laboratories, an actor who tries to become Christ.

Of course, “The Heart of the World”‘s most stellar aspect is Maddin’s crazed visual sense, unleashing a barrage of close-ups that collapses cross-cutting in on itself. It is never incoherent, which only adds to the disorientation of the already strange images. And yet, this effect causes the viewer to have the most curious emotion: pride. Whether it be caused primarily by the formal mastery, the soaring and hyperkinetic score, or just the Soviet-inspired images, this sense of pride is among the most awe-inspiring feelings I’ve had watching a film; it appeals to the cinephile with its final exultation of “Kino”, but it also appeals to a primal thrill, an elemental fascination with the kind of purity of expression that Maddin uses here. “The Heart of the World” is a short for all humanity, beautiful, crazed, and breathless.