The Saddest Music in the World

Tears for beers: Iconoclastic Canadian Guy seeks The Saddest Music in the World

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Winnipeg, 1933. Workers felled by the Great Depression beg in the icy doorways of ramshackle buildings or are carted off on litters to mass graves. Picking their way daintily through this detritus of poverty come down-on-his-luck Broadway producer Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) and his aptly-named mistress, Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros)--a beautiful amnesiac who claims to take advice from an invisible tapeworm.

Lured by an encounter with a fortune-teller, Chester has come to the frigid town to compete in a lavish contest to find the world's most melancholic music. Behind this extravaganza is beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini in a Mae West wig), a double-leg amputee whose bitterness is assuaged only by cash and the tight-lipped attentions of attractive young men. Having learned that the desire to imbibe increases exponentially with sadness, the powerful Port-Huntly is looking for a sorrowful soundtrack for her business; and so a multinational cacophony--including Scottish pipers and Eskimo fiddlers--has invaded "The World Capital of Sorrow" to compete for a $25,000 prize.

Welcome to the fevered imagination of Guy Maddin, the Canadian experimental filmmaker who claims David Lynch's Eraserhead is his biography (and who probably created the character of Port-Huntly in homage to the title character of Lynch's 1974 short, The Amputee). Whatever his inspirations, Maddin's addiction to melodrama and silent-movie conventions has produced some of the most startlingly original and subversively intelligent films of the last 15 years, including Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary. Like its predecessors, The Saddest Music in the World glows with Maddin's signature visual style: the ethereal black-and-white images that shade from crystalline silver to treacly pitch, the pin-dot photography, the brilliantly fizzy backlighting. The overall effect is hallucinatory and even alien, like a broadcast from a distant star.

"Canadians are really crappy mythologizers," said Maddin in a recent interview. "I just thought that if no one was going to make a myth about Winnipeg...I'd do it myself." Though adapted from an unlikely source--an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born, English-bred novelist who penned The Remains of the Day--Maddin's mythmaking tends to draw occasionally from his own life. Chester's rival for both the money and Narcissa is his long-lost brother, Roderick (Chris Noth look-alike Ross McMillan), a monumentally depressed cellist with hypersensitive skin. Maddin's own brother was a suicide, and the filmmaker himself suffers from a rare neurological condition that makes him feel as though he's constantly being touched.

But Maddin's films are more than just old-fashioned pastiches or ways of working through his own issues. His peerless, six-minute short film, The Heart of the World--an Eisensteinian tale of (yet again) two brothers in love with the same woman--is a frenetic, masterful commentary on human disregard for the degradation of our planet. And in The Saddest Music in the World it's impossible to ignore Maddin's jabs at the ruthlessness of entertainment (Hollywood musicals were just taking hold in the early 1930s), and, in particular, its ability to capitalize on human misery.

Vital and delirious, The Saddest Music in the World hurtles along on twin tracks of vaudevillian humor and gleeful bad taste. As Siam prepares to engage Mexico, a perky female radio commentator fills us in: "No one can beat the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats, or twins," she trills uselessly, in a divine parody of red-carpet drivel. And as the winners of each heat slide ecstatically into a massive vat of beer, the film whips itself into a froth of love triangles, singing hockey players, and a pair of sparkling, beer-filled glass legs. Not even David Lynch could ask for more.