Flak Magazine: Review of The Saddest Music in the World, 08.09.04

Guy Maddin's oddball The Saddest Music in the World frustrates the moviegoer's every expectation but nevertheless entertains grandly. More than a modern copy of early cinema style, Saddest Music revitalizes melodrama as a mode of contemporary storytelling.

The preposterous plot: In the depths of the Great Depression, brewmistress and double-amputee Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) announces a single-elimination tourney among nations to determine which can produce the most sorrowful music. Her rationale? When people hear sad music, they want to drink beer. ("If you're sad, and like beer, I'm your lady.") Hopefuls flock to Winnipeg, Canada, from around the globe for a shot at "$25,000 Depression-era dollars." Pygmies come with pounding drums and rituals of self-mortification; a Spanish woman sings a stern reproof to her dead child; even Siam sends a lone, despairing flutist. As the announcer gushes, "No one can beat the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats or twins, but until now I'm embarrassed to admit I never took Siamese sadness all that seriously."

Among the contestants are Lady Port-Huntley's former lover Chester (Mark McKinney), his amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiro) and his brother Roderick (Ross McMillan). Chester, a Canadian by birth but American by choice, is perpetually, unflappably happy and horny. Roderick — who represents Serbia as the black-clad Gravillo the Great — carefully husbands the sorrows of war and personal loss, letting them build upon each retelling. And their father, Fyodor (David Fox), vainly hopes to woo Lady Port-Huntley by giving her fully functional beer-filled glass legs. Seriously.

We may have thought ourselves too sophisticated to enjoy these sorts of paper-thin characters and their outsize, operatic emotions, but Maddin delightfully proves us wrong. None of his characters grows, changes or surprises with hidden depth. They are the broad types they seem to be — the vain but wounded queen, the fast-talking Yank, the beatific woman, the melancholy artist and the man in wild but unrequited love. With this short libretto, one could easily follow the action of Saddest Music, even with the sound off.

But what a mistake it would be! Saddest Music plays, not to our brains, but to our senses and sentiments. The haunting score — winner of the 2004 Genie Award for Best Achievement in Music in Maddin's native Canada — grants heft to the cartoonishly unreal characters onscreen. Every terror of the world is given sonorous voice and, so confronted, flies away. We identify with the principals of Saddest Music because such people are we — how often do the things that mean so much to us seem simple-minded folly to the world? Those amours du feu are filled with emotions so fierce and subtle that mere words could never suffice. Only music knows our longing.

Surreal plot, stock dramatic leads, otherworldly score — how else can Maddin set Saddest Music apart? By ignoring the conventions of photorealism. In an age obsessed with the fidelity and clarity of the image, Maddin fashions his film like decaying stock. Mostly black and white with occasional red or blue tinting, the film is flecked, cracked, ghostly, discolored, sometimes jumpy. This is the world of sorrow, by turns cloudy and stark, dim and blinding. Not only does Maddin's use of archaic-looking film allow for lovely shots (de Medeiros in particular radiates with star quality), it heightens the melodrama. In this world, the aesthetic weeps with the characters.

Saddest Music has one foot in the hammy, heartfelt traditions of A Fool There Was and Metropolis, and another in the mournful but knowing spirit of Decasia, the 2002 art film that composed from rotting footage a meditation on the nature of time and mortality. Whether Maddin's New Melodrama can balance the innocence of early cinema with the self-reflective experience of modern moviemaking is an open question. But make no mistake — in stretching further back, digging into even more-primitive film prototypes than those emulated by Down With Love, Far From Heaven or Moulin Rouge!, Maddin has prepared the staging area for the next revolution in two-dimensional movie characters.

— Martin Scribbs (bluerb@yahoo.com)