“If you’re sad, and like beer, I’m your lady,” so quips Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) as she announces a $25,000 contest for the saddest
music in the world. The setting is Winnipeg, smack in the middle of the Great Depression, where when Prohibition was taking place in America, apparently Canadians were literally swimming in beer. This is what you might call a classic Guy Maddin storyline. A hodgepodge of early cinematic styles and storylines all filtered through the genius of one of the world’s most refreshing filmmaking minds. It might be fair to describe this as Maddin’s first backstage musical, however the musical numbers take backseat to the film’s imagery, which is literally drunk with cinematic nostalgia. Maddin once again has crafted a gorgeous, visionary world of highly artificial sets evoking early Soviet Constructivism and German Expressionism, and rendered using an array of handheld photography ranging from grainy black and white to a primitive two-strip Technicolor.

The cast is composed of numerous oddities including, an amnesiac nymphomaniac (Maria de Medeiros), a cynical dollar minded American (Mark McKinney), and his brother--the representative of Serbia--a depressed musician who carries around his deceased child’s heart preserved in a jar of his own tears. If this wasn’t enough, there is also Isabella Rossellini’s character of the legless beer baroness, no doubt an homage to the great Lon Chaney and his numerous “legless” roles, who sports a pair of glass legs filled with the shimmering glow of cold beer. Don’t be fooled and think that this film might be “too weird” for the casual viewer. The Saddest Music in the World is a dazzling and magical film that contains more imagination in a single frame than you are likely to come across in the whole of the current musicals that Hollywood has been churning out.  out of     

Adam Lemke