Customer Reviews

The Saddest Music in the World

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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 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.

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD is much more than just director Guy Maddin's exercising his talents. Though the story of a Winnipeg bilateral amputee beer hall baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) staging a world competition for the saddest music may sound a bit silly, watch this film for a competition to beat all competitions, a grand spectacle where a Thai flautist competes with a Mexican Ranchero band, Russians, Chinese, Serbians etc.

Add to this the personal tragedy of Lady Helen facing her lover Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) who watched while his father Dr. Fyodor Kent (David Fox) mistakenly and drunkenly amputated both of her legs after a car accident while Chester's brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) exiles himself to Serbia over the loss of his wife Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) and child, constantly playing his sad music on his cello!

All this may sound a bit over the top, but it is actually WAY over the top and happily so. Maddin has shot the film primarily in black and white in the just-out-of-focus manner of the earliest of movies (the story, after all, takes place in the Great Depression).

But despite the emphasis on 'artiness', the story is not mere parody or wedge of surrealism: there are many cogent social comments here - enough to keep you thinking. This film may not be for everyone, but for those who enjoy something different, it is highly recommended! Grady Harp, November 2004

If you know that Isabella Rossellini is married to David Lynch, you will have no problem understanding why she chose to star in this film. Director Guy Maddin tells a bizarre story, filmed through a snowy, distorted lens in black and white, making for a truly surreal vision. The story itself is simply about a Baroness in Canada who recrutes musicians from around the world to promote the worlds "saddest" music for a large sum of money. However, instead of gut wrenching sorrowful music, the audience is treated to a unique collage of `cold' characters seeming to come from the 19th century. The cinematography is fantastic, but the characters don't bring much life to the story. They are all stilted, bland inventions plucked straight from a silent film. At best the film is a study in film cinematography and style. There is love, tragedy and all the elements of true cinema, but it never fully evolves. However, the film is an advanced version of what David Lynch might have done if he chose this story, time and place. This film is for the real film buff who will not be disappointed.

The extra featurettes are truly amazing and spark enough interest in what a filmmaker will do to make his dream come true.

The premise: would-be minstrels gather in Winnipeg in 1933 for the "Port Huntley Lager Saddest Music in the World" contest, intended to bring levity to the "saddest city in the world" at the height of the great depression, and sell a few beers along the way. I think the braintrust behind this film had a few too many Port Huntley lagers when they were coming up with this one. A bizarre movie with a generally incomprehensible plot, made interesting by the 1930s era stylings of the visuals - part silent flic, part surrealism, part Movietone News reel. Goofy, entertaining performances abound, particularly by Rosselini as the legless beer magnate. I can't really say that I liked it, but I was certainly intrigued enough to keep watching.

I can't believe i waited so long to see it but i'd never heard of Guy Madden.
It's so good!
Of course,being fairly strange, a lot of people will dislike it but if you like David Lynch films you'll like this.
Isabella Rossellini is one of my favourites as well so her being in it was a bonus.
I laughed my ass off at the surreal situations the characters were in.
The scene with the old lady fortune teller and the block of ice was priceless.
Acting was excellent all around and the music was of course very delicious and sad.;-)

Saddest music is haunting,surreal and hilarious. It finds humor in the darkest days of the depression with an almost creepy quality that must be seen to be explained. Isabella is so reminiscent of her mother it is uncanny. I highly recommend this film as I'm sure it will become a cult classic.

Guy Maddin's stylized film, "The Saddest Music in the World," has been mislabeled as "Surrealist;" it is not. The visual display of the settings, along with the stylized costumes fall clearly into the stage and film genre called "expressionistic-contructivistic," a creature of design from the 1920s silent film studios, primarily, of the UFA films complex near Berlin, and the mechanistic stage-designs of the early Soviets, under the watchful eye of the Kommisar of Education (Culture), Lunacharski.
The formal or sociological element of such "expressionism" remains with the placement of man-the-victim, into a hostile world environment, in which the atmostphere, itself, is mephitic, and hopeless. Man struggles against a "system," as the playwright, August Strindberg, wrote his "The Dream Play," which is ever forlorn to him; he is adrift, as it were, in a sea of ethical indifference.
Now, the people of such an expressionistic film are always flawed in both their character and background development. They share the burden of a shameful "historicity" of their past as the Phenomenologists would say; while, at the same time the characters bravely struggle against 1.) the environment, 2.) their antagonists, and 3.) themselves, in good "existentialist" fashion.
Whether the characters of "Saddest Music" can be justly punished, reprieved, or liberated from their past transgressions and omissions, remains the film's thesis. Their confrontations and recollection-of-past-confrontations comprise the film's major point in the drama.
One other observation should be made about Maddin's work which has been somewhat overlooked. His aesthetic dwells with both the "exotic" and "grosteque" in life, a distinct and popular, 19th-century pictoral genre. Federico Fellini also used grostesquerie to great effect in expresssing his photographic selectivity. All in all, the characters of "Saddest Music" lead lives of desperation, and certainly not "quite desperation" at that.
There is little empathy or identification associated with the charcters in Maddin's film, leading to one's more passive (or as Berthold Brecht would say, "objective") observance of it, as, say, one might watch performers in a circus, or, following Brecht's postulation a bit further, one experiences what he called "epic drama" as distinct from empathic,"engaged," or subjective drama. With the latter a person must resort psychologically to S.T. Coleridge's "willful suspension of disbelief," in order to engage in the drama. Maddin's film does not require any such submersion, but rather exhibits itself as a "presentation" of bizarre events, matrixed by the remoteness of place and time, rather than exposed as a "representation" of meaningful events as displayed in a conventional, narrative drama. No, as another Canadian once remarked, the medium is the message in "Saddest Music," and what a medium-message it is!
As such, "Saddest Music" is a film-maker's film, a superb example of what a group of talented, educated film-technicians can do with visual material and, of course, three-million dollars. "Saddest Music" is a "Sundance Film," _ne plus ultra_. All readers who enjoyed the silent films of the early German/Russian period in the 1920s should enjoy this work very much. "The Saddest Music in the World" is the best film I've seen at a Sundance Film Festival in many-a-year.

Just about any of Guy Maddin's films would have made interesting additions to the midnight movie circuit, but perhaps his most accessible feature to date, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, is the one most likely to sell a few soundtrack albums as well.

Tongue-in-cheek social satire and musical melodrama merge in this expressionistic film that combines a loving homage to the early days of cinema with the sheer strangeness of life. The biting cold of winter and the circumstances of the Great Depression have turned 1933 Winnipeg into the saddest place on earth. As a marketing ploy, leg-less beer Baroness, Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) stages an international competition to find the saddest music in the world. With $25,000 going to the winner, oddball musicians and two-bit schemers pour into the Canadian town from all over the world. Among them is smarmy, down-on-his-luck Broadway impresario Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), returning home with his amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros). As the contest progresses, Chester finds himself competing against his estranged brother while also re-igniting a past love-triangle involving himself, the Baroness, and his own alcoholic, ex-surgeon father. Complicating matters further are the secret identity of Narcissa, and the elder Kent's gift to the Baroness--a pair of beer filled, glass, prosthetic legs. Spectacular musical numbers alone can't save the sad characters from fate, and ultimately tragedy strikes as the last note is sounded.

Maddin's signature archaic visual look, his unique sense of humor, and his subplots-and-triangles driven storytelling are all displayed here in abundance. Rather than spotlighting a single romantic triangle, a pair of interlocked trios buttresses this momentous melodrama. Played with wondrous flair, Chester revels in the fact that he's stolen the hearts from his emasculated father and brother former lovers. Playing with some of his favorite themes (rival brothers, amnesia, a missing parent) and embracing the trappings of the musical, Maddin has succeeded in creating an accessible, artful, and ambitious film.

I rented this film on a whim, that is the title and the cover of Isabella Roselini in a bleach blond wig smothered in a world of blue. Why not? I walk through Blockbuster wondering if there is ever anything worth seeing that I haven't already. The vast majority of Hollywood comedies are unfunny to me. What a discovery! I have been watching films for over 45 years and never have seen such a hilarious tongue-in-cheek presentation of a film about sadness. Three of the five most important characters are wallowing in their own self-pity to such extremes I couldn't believe it or stop laughing. German expressionism copycat...whatever dude...get over yourselves. It's set in the depression and it's about sadness. Where would you rather have it based? In Hawaii? The low budget sets were beliveable and the over the top acting was right in tune with the theme. I can't wait to see his earlier pics.

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.