Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney

It may be hard to imagine a more perverse programming choice than a National Film Board documentary chronicling the rise of Brian Mulroney, Canada’s 18th prime minister, appearing in TIFF’s storied and sordid Midnight Madness section. Yet Matthew Rankin’s kaleidoscopic culture jam warrants such curatorial chaos, as the visionary filmmaker behind Universal Language (TIFF ’24) conjures an electric, retro-pop fever dream that mythologizes and scrutinizes the mutation of Canadian progressive conservatism as it was understood under John “Dief the Chief’ Diefenbaker to its contemporary, rightward, populist pathology — err, I mean ideology.

Through an episodic remix that transforms thousands of hours of archival footage, Rankin astutely tracks the political maneuvering that took place during the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention and into the 1980s Canadian landscape right before Mulroney’s clinching the title of prime minister. Only he infuses this political soup with nostalgic intrusions of Canadian television and outlandish dramatizations, from Mulroney conferencing with a former PM’s pickled brain to Pierre Trudeau despotically ruling the country as a floating head like TRON’s Master Control Program. The result is reminiscent of Rankin’s debut feature, The Twentieth Century (TIFF ’19), which reimagined the ascension of William Lyon MacKenzie King as a German Expressionist farce, and especially his early collage work.

Culminating as if documentarian Adam Curtis overdosed on a psychic stream of Heritage Minutes, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is a dank, elucidative experiment that distills historical record through savvy psychedelic abstraction and satirical irreverence. If that ain’t Midnight Madness, then Téléfrançais!’s Ananas ain’t a talking pineapple.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: strobing effects