Hey folks, Harry here... Here's a review from Guy Maddin's THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, which is playing up at SUNDANCE. The film has been widely praised from Toronto for it's wonderful use of style, design and period. Maddin makes films often in the style of F. W. Murnau... A heightened stylistic surreality that permeates from beginning to end. As if to say, not every film must be a 3 act film that is told from the modern aesthetic fashions of the day. There is an entire history of film and if one wishes to tell a story in a retro-hybrid style using limited modern cinematic devices, well SOUTH PARK works in the most limited animation style around... other than, oh, let's say, Don Hertzfeldt... and both are brilliant and funny as hell.
The Saddest Music In The World
According to the press notes this is Guy Maddin’s "most accessible work to date". O-kay.
Whether that’s a boast, a joke or a guilty admission, it’s definitely not a good sales pitch for the rest of his oeuvre.
The Saddest Music In The World plays out like a cross between a silent movie, a 1920s horror film and the demented outtakes from Moulin Rouge.
It’s set in Depression-era Winnipeg, a mournful refuge for down and outs run by an all powerful but literally legless beer baroness played by Isabella Rossellini. With Prohibition coming to an end she decides to promote her brand by staging a competition to find the saddest music in the world. Musicians are drawn from across the globe, all of them instilled with the lugubrious spirit of the Great Depression. Among them are the baroness’ old flames, Chester and his father Fyodor, as well as his widowed brother Roderick and the mysterious Narcissa, Chester’s amour du jour.
Their battle to win the prize becomes a broad allegory of racial and familial tension, as well as a simple minded comment on the seamier side of the American dream. Chester’s determination to give the crowd a bit of authentic Yankee razzle dazzle is undermined by his bizarre sexual entanglements and soured relationships with his father and brother which steer the competition towards tragedy.
Technically there’s much to admire about Maddin’s work. The shoot was conducted inside a Canadian warehouse that was so large and cold it reportedly developed its own weather system. And the look of the film is spot on – grainy black and white with a vaseline smear at the edges of the frame that evokes old images of Buster Keaton and the Charleston.
Emotionally, however, things are less impressive. Mark McKinney’s Chester is a literal-minded portrayal of the typical American huckster, while Ross McMillan inhabits the costume rather than the character of Roderick. Having said that, the charatcers are so obviously emblematic of Maddin’s wider themes they’re really just a collection of caricatures engaged in a series of stagey showpieces. Isabella Rossellini is too theatrical as the mutilated Lady Port-Huntley (though she does get the film’s most creepy scene when her legs are sawed off) while Maria de Madeiros emerges with some credit as the fragile, winsome Narcissa.
There’s unlikely to be much of an audience for this film. It’s an interesting stylistic piece, but even that begins to wear thin after half an hour. It’s a case of art for art’s sake, and one that doesn’t have an enormous amount to say about art at that.
Chebenski
