Did anyone here say abstinence is a virtue? And isn’t it better to be an obsessive than a staid stick in the mud? “I wanted to overwhelm... I wanted the color palette to break people´s brains,” says Guy Maddin about his latest technicolor phantasmagoria, aptly describing it as a Russian nesting doll of a film. Here the directors superimpose and intermingle a multitudinal series of adventures drawn from actual film plots while freely taking inspiration from the silent era and the days when sound first began making headway in the film industry. An affectionate pastiche of the instructional film, the story of a man who cannot stop pinching women’s backsides, traces of German Expressionism, and over-the-top numbers that seem to have dropped out of a musical. The result is pure hedonist hooch, an intense motion picture that seems to burn with a fever as it moves indefatigably from idea to idea with the same care it gives to each and every shot. A film that’s like a game – full of adventure, terror, and burning passion even though there’s nothing to fear.