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| The Saddest Music in the World
Directed By: Guy Maddin Plot
Summary - Review 1 - Review
2 - CURRENT REVIEWS
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| A sort-of musical set in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, where a beer baroness organizes a contest to find the saddest music in the world. Musicians from around the world descend on the city to try and win first place - a $25,000 prize. [TRAILER] Not to oversimplify things, but there are two types of moviegoers in this world: those who come to the movies to drift away and those who long to be shaken awake. The provocative and ingenious Guy Maddin (“Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary,” “The Heart of the World”) is a director of the second philosphy, rarely content in merely shaking an audience awake, but more often jostling it violently into a hieghtened state of consciousness. His movies are always ambiguous and enticing, shot in grainy black and white straight out of a dream and featuring a mix of characters and emotions that are simultaneously perverse yet wholesome; morbid yet comic; absurd yet realistic. And try as you may, they are works that cannot be ignored. "The Saddest Music In The World," is a bizarre fable of contrasting tones and emotions that is the ideal match for Maddin’s bizarre style. Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) is an eccentric but depressed brewery owner, who lost her legs in a car accident and now lives in what the London Times has labeled the saddest city of the '30's depression: Winnepig. As a rather shrewd financial scheme to monopolize on this sorrow, she organizes a worldwide competition to discover the saddest music in the world, in which every country will choose its ambassadors, its musical pieces, and compete head-to-head against other nations until a winner is declared. In perhaps the film's most creative contrast, however, this intriguing contest is not an exploration of emotion or music, but really little more than Port-Huntly's attempt to sell a few extra pints of beer. Bring in sad people, get people depressed, and they’ll down some more booze. Two of the competitors have been intimately involved with the Lady in the past: Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), the cocky and brass American playboy whom she once loved and Fyodor (David Fox), Chester's Canadian father, who amputated Port-Huntly's legs and also finds himself in love with her. Fyodor's second son, and Chester's brother, is the famous Roderick (Ross McMillan) from Serbia, who has lost his son and his wife and is the melancholy favorite to win the competition. There is considerable political commentary at work here, as Chester's American brashness conflicts with his father's Canadian timidness and his brother's Serbian guilt. In one of the many digs at America, Chester starts paying off other countries to remove themselves from the contest and join America's team instead, in effect buying out the competition. Not to mention the fact that America spends a considerable amount of time in bed with the judge. This summary does not even begin to address the many exaggerations and contrivances that send the story spiraling in different directions. In fact, thinking about the story now, removed from the context of the film, I admit it's outright absurd. But something happens in Maddin's dreamy, distorted and hysterical delivery that brings something natural and organic to this delirious dream. It seems perfectly appropriate that Chester is dating Roderick’s ex-wife, who does not remember ever having seen the latter. It is only natural that Huntley has a blinded orchestra that appears out of the mist to serenade her. It is a fantasy Maddin sees it. And in creating it, he helps us to see it as well. At one point in the film Chester says that "sadness is just happiness turned on its ass. It’s all showbiz!" and this single play on words summarizes this entire experience. "Saddest Music" is an exercise in juxtaposition, in overwhelming the viewer with so many contradictory images and emotions that we eventually succumb to a journey we cannot hope to decipher. Just consider some of the film's contrasting messages. A crowd cheers and boos depressing music; an ecstatic Port-Huntly is infatuated with her new, beer-filled glass legs; giddy radio announcers debate the depression factor of each piece; the winner of each battle takes a victory dip into a giant mug of beer. For that matter, the story's final three minutes deserve their own essay. In seemingly the blink of an eye, we are enraptured by Maddin's one patient moment of sorrow, and then immediately disoriented again by the ultimate contrast of giddiness and gloom. And we are then left alive, alert and bewildered, staggering out of the theater, debating the meaning of it all. Is Maddin trying to say that only in sadness can we find our real humanity? That emotion is inherently contradictory? That America lacks an emotional perspective? Similar to the work of Lars Von Trier in "Dancer In The Dark," the cynical and somewhat comical answer is that there is no answer. Life is the absurd paradox that it is; a mysterious journey devoid of the meaning or answers we spend our lives searching for. The key to appreciating Maddin is to realize that he doesn't much care about making sense of it all.   Check out Reviews, Commentary, and More at Zertinet.com |
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