The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

Something Strange:
Guy Maddin Brings a New Meaning to the Term Wierd

Winnipeg, midwinter, 1933. The city has just been designated the saddest city in the world by the London Times—for the fourth year in a row.

Beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) decides to take advantage of the situation by hosting a contest to determine which country plays the saddest music in the world. The winner will receive $25,000. And Lady Port-Huntley will be able to advertise and sell more beer.

Musicians come from all around the world to participate in the knock-out competition. After all, as one contestant says, “Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass; it’s all showbiz.”

Among the contestants, representing Canada is Fyodor Kent(David Fox), one of Winnipeg’s own. He is also the person responsible for turning Lady Port-Huntley into a double amputee. A doctor as well as a musician, he was called to assist when she was trapped in the wreckage of a car crash. Inadvertently, he severed the wrong leg. Then, of course, he still had to amputate the trapped leg.

Since that time, Fyodor has been trying to create a pair of prosthetic legs for the beer baroness, who has very sensitive skin.

The contestants also include Broadway producer Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), representing America. Chester just happens to be Fyodor’s eldest son and Lady Port-Huntley’s ex-lover; he was driving the car in the accident.

Chester’s current girlfriend, Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), is an amnesiac who claims to have a tapeworm that talks to her—“Most tapeworms are chewers, not talkers” is Chester’s comment on that.

Chester and Narcissa arrive by plane. They pick their way along Winnipeg’s very snowy sidewalks, looking for a bus. When they find one, they step down into it, through the entrance in the roof—after all, Winnipeg is in the frozen North, and naturally the snow is stacked higher than the tallest vehicle in the street.

Discovering that Chester is from America, the driver asks if that’s where Narcissa comes from. Deadpan, she replies, “I’m not an American. I’m a nymphomaniac.”

Another contestant is a dolorous cellist from Serbia. He is especially sad, in part because he’s from the same country as Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and precipitated the Great War. Perhaps not coincidentally, the name of the cellist appears to be Gavrilo the Great.

However, draped in mourning black and wearing a veil, Gavrilo (who looks as if he has watched most of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films and paid special attention to Vincent Price’s costumes) turns out to be Fydor’s second son, Roderick (Ross McMillan), who recently lost his son and his wife.

The contest begins with Siam taking on Mexico. While radio announcers keep the world informed about the contest, Chester is busy behind the scenes. He is trying to bribe the other contestants so they’ll withdraw. And if that doesn’t work, he attempts to sign the losers so he can add them to his team—anything to win.

Meanwhile, Fyodor has perfected what is his latest—and perhaps oddest—attempt at prosthetic legs.

The Saddest Music in the World is the new movie from Winnipeg-based director Guy Maddin. He co-scripted it with longtime collaborator George Toles. It is based on a screenplay written several years ago by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, whose work includes The Remains of the Day.

Maddin’s most recent movies were all silent films. They include the dazzling short film The Heart of the World (2000), the delirious Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), and Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), a self-styled semi-autobiographical peep-show museum installation piece set in the 1930s (more than 10 years before Maddin was born) that deals with hockey, incest, and hairdressing. Maddin says he has been stuck in the 1920s for longer than the 1920s lasted.

In contrast to these movies, The Saddest Music in the World was shot in widescreen (like most movies made after the 1960s), on grainy, sometimes tinted, black-and-white film stock (like a 1920s silent movie), but this time the actors talk—and when they do, they speak like the actors in movies from the early 1930s.

Maddin's sad musicians come from the West Indies, and farthest Asia, and Europe, and Africa, and the Americas. The contest resembles a deranged version of some international song contest from the 1950s, with the winners of each round careening down a slide into a very large vat of beer. And the words of the radio commentators, who at times include the beer baroness herself, reach many people around the world—including alcohol-deprived, Prohibition-era Americans in the Midwest.

This wild, wacked-out farrago is played absolutely straight by Rossellini, McKinney, de Medeiros, McMillan, and Fox. Their characters know that they are in a life-or-death struggle. The result is a depression-era musical that is hilarious and, sometimes, oddly moving. And it is very, very strange.

Maddin’s eccentric no-budget movies have long been cult favorites. His first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), featured, among other things, an Icelandic fisherman who lived on the shores of Lake Winnipeg and groomed his hair using freshly squeezed fish oil.

Archangel (1990), an Arctic Russian WWI movie shot in the heart of Winnipeg, tells a story of mistaken identity and war and features another amputee, another amnesiac, and a large number of white rabbits that appear mysteriously in the night.

Careful (1992) is set in the Alpine village of Tolzbad (also created in Winnipeg, where there is barely the hint of a hill, never mind any mountains), a village whose inhabitants have to hold their simmering passions in check because if anyone raises their voice—ever—they might start an avalanche.

Lately, Maddin has shown signs of breaking out of the cult-film ghetto. The Heart of the World was a hit at film festivals. And Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, which had an enormous (for Maddin) budget of $1.6 million Canadian, was very successful on Canadian television and has blown away audiences lucky enough to see it in small art cinemas in the U.S.

Now there is The Saddest Music in the World, with an even larger budget (at $3.5 million Canadian, although still minuscule by Hollywood standards), with Rossellini as its star, and Maddin has found a distributor (IFC Films) ready to unleash his particular weirdness on the American public, letting the film pose an important question—Is America ready for Guy Maddin?

—John Bloomfield (26 April, 2004)

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Sergio Leone’s Violent, Operatic Fairy Tale

Three men arrive at a desolate railroad station. They lock the gnarled stationmaster in the station and settle down to wait for a train.

At one end of the platform Knuckles (the uncredited Al Mulock) runs his fingers through the water at a trough. Knuckles looks down the track. He sits on the trough then begins to crack his knuckles, one by one.

The second man, Stony (Woody Strode) stands in the shade of a water tank at the opposite end of the platform. He fans his face with his wide-brimmed hat. A drop of water hits him on top of his baldhead. He looks up, stays in place, then puts on his hat.

In the center of the station, the third man, Snaky (Jack Elam), sits with his head back against the station wall. A fly buzzes and lands on his face. He looks down trying to see it on his left cheek. He tries to blow it away. The fly moves onto his chin, then his lips. He keeps trying to blow it away.

Under the water tank, water drips onto Stony’s hat.

Snaky swats the fly away with his hand. It lands on the side of the bench. Snaky slowly pulls out his gun, and swiftly traps the fly in the barrel.

The train approaches the station. Stony slowly takes off his hat, carefully lowers it, and sips the water from the brim. Snaky shakes the fly out of his gun. Knuckles looks round. Stony cocks his gun. The train arrives.

The three men watch. A package is thrown out of a truck. They wait. The train begins to pull out the three men begin to walk away.

A piercing plaintive notes note from a harmonica sounds out. The three men turn round. As the train moves away, across the track, they see a passenger, with bags in both hands.

Harmonica (Charles Bronson) asks for Frank. “Frank sent us,” says Snaky.

“You bring a horse for me?” asks Harmonica.

Stony smiles at Snaky, who laughs as he says “Looks like we’re shy one horse.”

Harmonica shakes his head. “You brought two too many.”

On one side of the track the three gunmen; on the other Harmonica.

Snaky draws. Harmonica fans his gun and Knuckles and Snaky go down. As Stony falls slowly he gets in a shot and Harmonica goes down.

The ten-minute opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is typical of the movie. Small details seen in excruciating detail, accompanied by natural sounds—the creak of a door, the grating sound of chalk on a board, the squeaking of a mill, the drip of water into a hat, the buzz of a fly, the sounds of a train—then suddenly burst of violence and four men are shot.

Immediately after this opening sequence, through which the credits appear, Leone cuts to the McBain farm. Brett McBain (Frank Wolff) and his two sons and daughter are preparing for the arrival of McBain’s new bride, when they are gunned down by a group of men wearing long dusters. One of the men asks Frank, their leader, what to do about the youngest son. Frank’s response is to kill the boy—this coldest of cold-blooded killers is played by the blue-eyed Henry Fonda.

Soon, Jill (Claudia Cardinale), McBain’s bride and, now, widow, arrives. And the plot begins to unfold. It involves a dying railroad tycoon (Gabriele Ferzetti), for whom Frank and his gang work and who is trying to get control of McBain’s land. Then there is Cheyenne (Jason Robards), an outlaw, and the mysterious Harmonica—both of these men, for there own reasons, decide to help Jill when she attempts to keep the McBain land.

An uncut version of Once Upon a Time in the West is now available on DVD. The movie was shot on locations in Spain and in Arizona and Utah, with one beautiful sequence filmed in Monument Valley. The magnificent photography in Techniscope and Technicolor is by Tonnio Delli Colli. The music is by the great Ennio Morricone—unusually, the movie’s main themes were composed and recorded before filming began, so that Leone directed the action with the music already in his mind. The result is a most extraordinary Western—full of languorous detail punctuated by explosions of violence.

Leone said his “films are for grown ups but they remain fairy tales and they have the impact of fairy tales.” Then he added, “The fusion of realistic settings and fantasy story can give a film a sense of myth, of legend”—Once upon a time...in the West.

—John Bloomfield (20 September, 2005)

Lost in Translation (2003)

Truth in the Night:
Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray Shimmer in Sofia Coppola’s Surprise Hit

Tokyo, nighttime. A limousine travels through the luminous downtown streets, carrying film star Bob Harris. In his mid-50s, his marriage becoming stale, his career flagging, Bob has come to make whiskey commercials—instead of being with his children or appearing in a play.

Charlotte, a Yale philosophy graduate in her early 20s, is in the same hotel. Her husband is busy photographing a Japanese rock band.

Neither Bob nor Charlotte can sleep. Their paths cross as they wander around, both lost in time.

Writer-director Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is beautifully constructed from impressionistic fragments.

Sometimes Charlotte is alone—at a Buddhist shine watching the art of flower arrangement, on the bullet train to Kyoto, observing a formal Japanese wedding.

While she explores Japanese culture, Bob makes a whiskey commercial with a vociferous Japanese director, poses as a member of the Rat Pack at a photo shoot, and appears on a talk show with a host described as the Japanese Johnny Carson—although Johnny Carson never looked this lurid.

Bill Murray, who has never shown such a raw vulnerability before, is Bob. And the astonishing, husky voiced Scarlett Johansson incarnates Charlotte, the intelligent Yale graduate still searching for her place in life while realizing she may have made a mistake in her marriage. Although Murray could was nominated for an Oscar for his brilliant performance, Johansson was surprisingly overlooked by the academy voters.

Charlotte takes Bob to meet some Japanese friends. On the way back, he sleeps briefly in the cab, then carries her, as she sleeps, to her room. He tucks her into bed and leaves.

The next evening, still having trouble sleeping, they talk in Bob’s hotel room. She first noticed him in the hotel bar.

"You were very dashing," she says. "I liked the mascara"—he was wearing makeup after filming the commercials. He says he saw her earlier in the elevator when she smiled at him.

They lie fully clothed on his bed. She tells him she feels lost. She asks about marriage. She’s asked him before—then his answers were flippant. Now he is completely straightforward, telling her it is hard.

She says she doesn’t know who she is. She tried writing, but she is so cruel. She tried taking pictures—saying it’s a phase every girl goes through. He tells her she should keep writing and adds, "I’m not worried about you."

He tells her that when you have children, it is terrifying, that it completely changes your life, but that they turn out to be "the most delightful people you’ll ever meet in your life."

After this episode of truth-telling in the middle of the night, they lie together on the bed, fully clothed—Bob on his back, Charlotte curled up on herside, facing him.

Her toes just touch his thigh. Bob opens his right hand and places it on her bare feet—it is a beautiful moment of intimacy between two friends.

Lost in Translation glows with the possibilities of what might not be. "Let’s never come here again," Charlotte says to Bob. "It could never be as much fun."

[This review of Lost in Translation is dedicated to Fran.]

—John Bloomfield (9 February, 2004)