The 20th Century

This film could have been made by Wes Anderson if he was a more predatory and subversive director, or Ken Russell, if he were interested in statesmen on par with other great directors. Matthew Rankin's film tells the partially fictionalized storyof young William Lyon Mackenzie King, the three-time Prime Minister of Canada, which the director wrote by reading between the lines of the future politician's diary, one filled with anguish and shame for unspecified transgressions. King is shown here as a repulsive individual, an Oedipal mama's boy and shoe fetishist driven by a pathological ambition to rule the country. He leads his pathetic life in a grotesque version of Canada, a frosty, expressionist Neverland, where the skills of clubbing baby seals and signing your name with urine in the snow are highly valued.