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)
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)
posted by John Bloomfield at 9:17 PM
1 Comments:
Strange as it may seem, as I don't generally like silent movies or ballet, I really did quite enjoy Madden's Dracula.
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