The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

Experiments, madness, comedy, drama, musical and some more.

I was unaware of Guy Maddin movies until I saw this one, so from the start to the end I was in awe about a director that came to me from nowhere and managed to surprise me. I am saying this as I have seen quite a few (1000's maybe) movies, and I am very hard to be surprised by something.

Without any doubt the movie IS one of the most original ones I've seen in years, and beside the strange techniques used (black/white grainy film, alternating with color-grainy as well, theater-like sets, etc..) the originality of the director is never the less amazing.

Of course quite a few people left the theater during the movie, but that's understandable, as this is just for the die-hard fans of good/art films. If you thought SALLO was a good movie, beside the cruelty on the screen, or if you actually understood Satyricon, then this movie might appeal you, otherwise don't waste your time on it.

I can't find a movie that can be related to this one, I just cannot!!! Great actors, great music and even a greater director: food for the soul.

8/10

Fmovies: So immediately after seeing this at the Toronto Film Festival, the woman behind me who I had to tell _twice_ during the screening to shut up stood up and proclaimed that she was going straight home to post to IMDB about how much she hated it. So here I've been forced to get an IMDB account to defend the film, despite never previously being a Guy Maddin fan. Final word: It's a great film. Challenging, sure. Unconventional, sure. If you thought Armageddon or Titanic was the greatest movie ever made, you may want to avoid this one, because you'll only end up going home to Hamilton to post to IMDB. But there is a good reason, probably, that so many reviewers have heaped praise on Maddin and on the film, and why it won the audience award at the Toronto Film Festival. Here is a film and a filmmaker that sees _film_ as an art form to be explored. Not just 100 minutes of celluloid streaming by to keep you occupied until bedtime. If you like unconventional, challenging movies that are outright entertaining, by all means see this one.

As anybody can see from the comments, you either 'get' Maddin or you don't. Ever since seeing 'Archangel' at the Toronto Film Festival in 1990, I've known that I am forever condemned to be one of his helpless, slavering acolytes. The way that he uses 'old film' tropes (jumps, scratches, bad post-sync, fuzzy sound, deteriorating film stock, deteriorating actors, deteriorating genres) is unlike any other director I've ever heard of. To some people it's a pointless exercise because who even watches REAL old movies, let alone perverse half-assed reconstructions of some old-movie half-remembered through a fog of delirium tremens. But the pointlessness IS the point, and so is the fact that he keeps obsessively returning to his obscure hometown of Winnipeg. This film is an apotheosis of all things Winnipegian, placing it at the heart of the world at least for 99 minutes. I love the local radio station that broadcasts to the whole world, and the montage sequences - Scotsmen, Africans, Mongolians all dropping everything and packing their instruments to flood into Canada for the titular song contest. I love the acting, which is pitch-perfect and never tilts over into smirking campery. I love the music and I love the full-blooded ending, which is as savage and as moving as the best of '30s melodrama. I love this movie, and I love the fact that Guy Maddin has now allied himself with Isabella Rossellini (they are apparently planning a biopic of her father Roberto) and from now on it will be much more difficult to sideline him as some backwoods dilettante with a silent cinema fixation. Tomorrow, the world!

The Saddest Music in the World fmovies. And I thought `Dogville' was stylized. Canadian writer/director Guy Maddin ("Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary,' "Archangel') has created a film like no other this year except possibly `Triplet's of Belleville.' `The Saddest Music in the World' is a `musical' set in Winnipeg in 1933, where Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) is holding a contest to award $25,000 to the saddest music performer. In `Depression Era dollars,' no less.

Winnipeg has been declared by the London Times `the world capital of sorrow' for the fourth year in a row. What happens in the film can be categorized as surrealism of the sort that marries the Melies brothers in their `Trip-to-the-Moon' wackiest to `The Twilight Zone' in Rod Serling's most hilarious (and that's pretty unusual) moments. Shot in distressed mode with 8 mm blown up to be grainy and silent movieish, `Saddest' has blue-grays and silvers and occasional bursts of washed-out color that give it an otherworldly cast meant to satirize the old movies and create a new look built on nostalgia and freedom from convention that some call expressionism.

Some of the bizarre acts vying for the prize are Fyodor (David Fox), a veteran of World War I representing Canada, who plays a deathlike version of ''The Red Maple Leaves'' on an upright piano he has turned over, and Indian singers in Eskimo costumes, who dance to ''California Here I Come'' with sitars and banjos commemorating a 19th-century kayaking accident. All the time an iris lens blurs the edges of the film to recreate the ancient look of film found in a vault after 50 years.

That Lady Port-Huntly needs artificial legs is not as bizarre as the back story of how she came to need them, and that the new glass legs have local beer coursing through them is just another creative and absurdist touch. With a resemblance to the robot in `Metropolis,' she is an amalgam of strange and prophetic moments in film and culture. I know I'm not making much sense here-Trust me that this film is bizarre enough to satisfy the geekiest cultist in our audience. For the rest of us, just trying to appreciate all the signposts Maddin constructs to further his absurd and funny vision is exhausting. Wordsworth's thoughts apply because we at least hear `the still, sad music of humanity.'

Guy Maddin is a master in at least one respect: he knows how to use 8mm film. Very few filmmakers attempt to use it at the length he does, or to such seemingly limitless invention, and all the while he has in mind an aesthetic somewhere in the middle of an expressionist silent film director and someone looking to break a little ground with a music video. In fact two of his films specifically, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary and Brand Upon the Brain, work better just as they appear to be: stories told in pantomime, without dialog, but also with all of the heavy emotions that come with. The Saddest Music in the World is a sound film, and must be in order to include such music and some occasionally really funny dialog. But its aesthetic is so bizarre and, indeed, eclectic to tastes of modern and pre-WW2 cinema that it has to be seen and heard to be believed.

The premise is that a "Lady" in Winnepeg (Rossellini) is hosting a contest for everyone around the world to come to Winnipeg to sing the saddest songs known anywhere, and the winner will receive 25 grand (in "Depression-Era" money). But there are complications- a devilish entrepreneur (Mark McKinney in a sly and convincing dramatic performance) comes into town to bring back old memories- the legs that Rossellini no longer has due to a horrible accident stacked upon a huge blunder by McKinney's father- and there's other troubles in romantic entanglements (i.e. McKinney's brother sees that Narcissa, played by Medeiros, is with him now and may have a talking tapeworm). There's this and more, plus the brothers' father in his attempt to resolve the situation with glass legs full of, yes, beer, plus the various competitions between countries with their own styles and vibrations and sorrowful melodies (there's even "Africa" at one point).

But a lot of this is, in fact, really crazy. So crazy that it takes a guy as smart and dedicated to his own warped craft like Maddin to make it make any kind of sense. But it does make sense, beautiful sense at times, and it's helped a lot out by the striking acting and the sense of morbid comedy that pops up from time to time (even just the announcers, who have that depression-era sensibility to them are funny). And watching the quixotic montage, the dazzling camera angles that sometimes go by in blinks or feverish moments in the midst of despair, make it all the more worthwhile. If I might not recommend it as overwhelmingly as Brand Upon the Brain it's only for a lesser connection emotionally with the material, of being pulled in inexorably to its conclusion. Nevertheless no one who wants to miss a challenge, take on something just this side of insanity and poetry, owes it to watch this- experience the songs, the romance. 8.5/10

Guy Maddin just gets better and better. In this, his latest film, he's outdone himself. The fusion of content and style is so brilliant, clever, and emotional, the film has to rank as one of the best of 2004 even with the year not yet being half over.

Set in 1933, "the depths of the Great Depression", the location is Winnipeg, Canada, home of Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rosselini), the astoundingly wealthy beer baroness of Canada, who decides to hold a contest to select the saddest music in the world--for business reasons, of course. Among the entrants are her former lover, Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), his current lover Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), Chester's estranged brother Roderick (Ross McMillan)--separated from Narcissa, and the men's father, Duncan (Claude Dorge). Duncan represents Canada; Chester, America; and Roderick, Serbia (of all places).

The prize is $25,000, a fortune in those days, so naturally there are entrants from all over the world--among which are Mexico, Siam, and Africa. The music is inspired, but eventually converges on the lilting popular American tune The Song is You, for which there are diverse renditions in the course of the film. The show-stopper is the version by Chester near the end, a big band production that fuses influences, in typical American fashion, from all over the world.

Familial tensions converge with unrequited love, and with the most peculiar prostheses anyone has ever seen--either in real life or on film. Lady Port-Huntly is a double amputee, and he whose reckless mistake resulted in her unfortunate current condition fashions for her a pair of legs that must be seen to be believed.

The entire film is shot using a blue-haze filter, with a faux stereopticon effect that narrows the viewing screen to that resembling what one would see from the early days of film, and with the faintest, subtlest and tiniest of lags in action-speech synchronization that makes this uncannily resonate as a work fusing a 30s setting, a pre-20s style, and a contemporary sensibility that knows how to combine these elements in the first place. This is a truly brilliant--I would even call it genius--approach to filmmaking that noone else in the known world even remotely approaches. Maddin is one of the contemporary masters of cinema and this is the proof.

As soon as this is available on DVD, I will buy it immediately. I suggest you do the same.