The Saddest Music in the World | Guy Maddin, Matthew Davies

The Saddest Music in the World | Guy Maddin, Matthew Davies | The music is you

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The Saddest Music ...

	The Saddest Music in the World Guy Maddin, Matthew Davies MGM (Video & DVD), 2004 average customer review:based on 46 reviews view larger image
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The dark days of the Depression set the stage for surreal black comedy in this "intoxicating" (Time) musical melodrama from acclaimed director Guy Maddin. When a legless beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini) in Winnipeg announces a contest to find the world's saddest tune, a pint of trouble brews among a fractured family competing for the $25,000 prize. As the disturbing depths of the linksbetween each other, the baroness and an amnesiac nymphomaniac are exposed, one thing becomes clear:It will take more than a pool of alcohol to drown their sorrows!

I Fear Music When I Call Your Name

If Un Chien Andalou, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, The Blue Angel, Samuel Beckett's "Film," Buster Keaton, German Expressionism, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, and LSD have any resonance for you - then you are ready to dive into a large, foamy vat of The Saddest Music In The World. This exquisite film is certainly not for everyone, but its intended audience will love it. I did.

Critics tend to be analytical people, and - like humorless individuals attempting to explain why a joke isn't funny - even the ones who praise this picture seem to be missing the point by a province or two. In dreams all things are possible and the unreasonable is reasonable. One does not dictate to a dream, one follows it in awe and rapture. In dreams it is quite normal for a man to carry the heart of his dead son with him everywhere in a bottle. In dreams, Marlene Dietrich-esque beauties hold court poised on glass legs filled with beer.

Certain performances deserve mention. Rossellini, always good, is exceptionally good here. Maria de Medeiros as Narcissa is quite unnerving, really powerful. But the sleeper performance is by David Fox as Fyodor Kent, the demented cellist. His character is from off the map, in all respects, and yet he has intense credibility throughout.

But. The hero of The Saddest Music In The World in director Guy Maddin, not to mention the set designers, costume designers, prop men and women, and especially cinematographers around him. This is a very funny, deeply absurd movie with layer upon layer of irony, silliness, homage, and self-referential humor. But what it is most is a feast, even an orgy, for the eyes - no small trick given that it's in B&W except for a few brief moments when it slips, again, dream-like, into color. Not a film to analyze, just surrender to it. You never saw a "battle of the bands" quite like this.

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The music is you

Love, death, beer, dismemberment, and really sad music.

"The Saddest Music" in the world is perhaps Guy Maddin's most accessable movie to date, from a director known for strange, eerie pieces of work. But it's also a brilliantly surreal tragicomedy, with shimmers of German expressionism painted over a story about fumbling for artificial happiness, in the middle of all that sad music.

It's snow-smothered Winnipeg, in the Depression. Failing producer Chester (Mark McKinney) and his amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) into a bar, just as beer baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) announces something on the radio: a musical contest for the saddest song in the world, with $25,000 as the prize. Hundreds of musicians arrive to compete, hoping to bag the prize (and get bathed in beer).

She is also an old flame of Chester's, who blames him and his alcoholic father for the loss of her legs -- a loss that his dad Fyodor (David Fox) is trying to remedy, by making her glass prosthetics. And his brother Roderick returns home, paralyzed by grief over his son's death and his wife leaving. But when he discovers his wife -- Narcissa -- is with his brother, he is determined to beat Chester. Who will create the saddest music in the world?

"The Saddest Music In the World" is a really weird movie -- it's full of glass legs, hearts in jars, skating funerals, and an antlered seer who predicts doom for Chester. But the movie is really focused on just one thing: the false happiness that people seek from transient things -- money, prosthetics, booze -- and how these only lead to more heartbreak in the end.

Maddin has a pretty unique style -- neo-expressionist, like an old 1920s German silent film made in twenty-first century Canada. It's grainy and full of rapid cuts (dozens of musicians playing until they bloody their hands), shadows and stark white faces, even against the drifting snow. The only exception is the dream sequences, which are just as blurry but full of vibrant colour.

But he sprinkles it with darkly humorous moments -- Fyodor chugging beer from a glass leg -- and dialogue ranging from zany ("I'm not an American. I'm a nymphomaniac") to weirdly poetic ("... to lay claim to the jewel-studded crown... of frozen tears"). And there are moments of sorrow too, such as Roderick playing his ultimate sad song, for a woman who is only starting to remember him.

McKinney is deliciously despicable as the amoral Chester, Medeiros is sweet as the wide-eyed nympho, and McMillan is heartbreaking as the mournful Roderick, who is haunted by the loss of his family. But Rossellini really rules the movie as the brilliantly cruel, powerful Lady Port-Huntley -- she rules every scene, even when she gets dumped into a bathtub.

"The Saddest Music in the World" is a deliciously bizarre tragicomedy, filmed with Guy Maddin's neo-expressionist flair. Definitely a unique, delightfully dark movie.

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The Greatest Movie in the World

Yeah, I'm exaggerating. I just love this movie so much. Guy Maddin is a genious. You must check out this film. Mark McKinney is hilarious. Isabella Rosellini is fantastic. That weird girl from Pulp Fiction, wonderfully weird. The music stays with you and so does the sadness. Buy this movie!

A Touch of the Absurd in Kafkaesque Brilliance

In classic Film Noir style, Guy Maddin directs The Saddest Music in the World, set in Winnipeg, Manitoba, (1933) during the depths of the Great Depression. Maddin, in collaboration with George Toles, sets the mood with an astute level of cinematography, employing old-fashioned iris lens techniques to create the antique, distressed look of a Golden-age movie-screen, using grainy blues and silvers to invoke moods of emotional intensity. He skillfully manipulates stark camera angles and chiaroscuro to accent light and shadowy effects, while highlighting exuberance and humor with unconventional music and dialogue.

Isabella Rossellini plays the role of the clever and tragic Lady Helen Port-Hunsley, a wealthy Canadian beer baroness who launches a world competition seeking the most melancholy music on the globe, as she endeavors to dramatically increase beer sales at the tail end of America's failed experiment of Prohibition. The purse is a huge twenty-five-thousand-dollar award that brings forth competitors from as far away as Scotland, Serbia and Siam. The main protagonist in the film emerges as the cynical Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), in contention with his brother, Roderick as Gavrillo the Great, and others in this great rivalry, where winners in each round slide into a giant vat of beer.

Twists and turns of emotion fill the plot, pulling you from humor to tragedy within a framework of grandeur and the absurd. As bygone secrets unravel, Fyodor, father of Chester and Roderick, attempts to exonerate his past guilt by fashioning glass legs filled with beer for Helen, his former lover, and the victim of an accidental amputation.

For those who appreciate imagination and avant-garde expressionism, Saddest Music is nourishment for the senses.

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Solid

Guy Maddin is a filmmaker I've heard alot of. Not good, not bad, but weird. So, it is no surprise that his hundred minute long 2004 film The Saddest Music In The World is not good, not bad, simply weird. Visually, however, it's a truly brilliant work, with color freely mixing with black and white, on contrived sets that evoke German Expressionism from the 1920s, and with Vaseline smeared on the lenses to give it a softer look. It also has a grainier feel in some sections, and reputedly was shot on 8mm film, then blown up to make it even grainier looking, as if it was just uncovered from some old studio's vault. The only other recent film that I've seen that invokes such a different place, time, and worldview was Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, which was also set in the 1930s. However, whereas that film was an homage to the classic serials and set in New York City, and global vista, and shot all on blue screen, this film is set in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada, and the world comes to Winnipeg, which has been chosen by the London Times as the world capital of sorrow, four years running.
Reputedly, the film is based upon a screenplay by the highly regarded novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (most famous for The Remains Of The Day) which Maddin and co-writer George Toles added their own idiosyncratic spin to. The plot is rather thin, and follows a legless and blondly bewigged beer baroness, Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), who decides to capitalize on the impending revocation of Prohibition in America top make a killing. She decides to hold a musical contest to determine the saddest music in the world, and offers a prize of $25,000.
Overall, The Saddest Music In The World is one of those films that I am loath to comment too harshly on. This is because while it fails, overall, as a film, one cannot help but admire the daring and vision of a director like Maddin. After all, in this dumbed down cookie cutter world of film put forth by megabucks Hollywood schlockmeisters like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and George Lucas, Maddin can easily and rightly be seen as a hero to arthouse, indy film lovers.
However, none of that concerns me as a critic. So, I have to say that, despite some razzle-dazzle, and the best of intentions, The Saddest Music In The World ultimately is not a good film. No, it's not a bad film, but one has to wonder what it might have been if the original Ishiguro screenplay had been more faithfully followed. Perhaps then it might have had some of the depth and real inquisitive power that great art has. As it is it is merely a curio. But, occasionally, them things can be damned flashy, can't they?

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