Dir. Guy Maddin, 2003, Canada, 99 mins
Cast: Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Madeiros, Mark McKinney
Review by Jean Lynch
Guy Maddin is what the French, in their Gallic wisdom, like to call an “artiste”, and the evidence is clearly demonstrable in The Saddest Music in the World. The film follows the story of Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), a failed impressario and his girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Madeiros), who return to his hometown of Winnipeg. Set in the Great Depression, Chester’s former lover, Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), the owner of the Muskeg Brewery, has just announced a $25,000 prize to find the saddest music in the world. Chester is keen to cash in but in doing so he re-ignites a tempestuous eternal triangle between himself, Lady Port-Huntley, and another of her former lover’s – Chester’s own father Fyodor (David Fox). Lady Port-Huntley is a double-amputee, having lost one limb in a motorcar accident with Chester, with the second a result of an inebriated, cuckolded Fyodor – an ex-surgeon – amputating the wrong leg. Chester and Lady Port-Huntley rekindle their bitter love affair, leaving Narcissa to come to terms with some old ghosts of her own, in the shape of Roderick (Ross McMillan), Chester ‘s taciturn, sombre brother.
The Saddest Music in the World is akin to watching an Aubrey Beardsley illustration come to life – dark, exaggerated, and both repelling and compelling at the same time, and then opening up into a F.W. Murnau Gothic backdrop, yet peppered with quirky dialogue and surreal, darkly comic images that wouldn’t be amiss in TV’s The League of Gentlemen. As with Maddin’s previous work, the film is a work of art in its truest sense – film as art, not the art of film. He delights in taking elements from any art form that is available to him, working them into the fabric of his films, and reconstructing them to achieve exactly the right effect on the audience. Thus, with Saddest Music, the film stock is grainy sepia toned black-and-white, emphasising the cold snowiness of the Winnipeg landscape; the nostalgia of the 1930s; and the grimness of the period. It is also a curious sensation to watch this almost perfect replicant of early twentieth century filmmaking and have the characters dialogue be so very offbeat and modern. Maddin, in his own inimitable way, is as referential as Tarantino is to his own subject matter, a cinematic magpie who takes from whatever catches his eye – or ears, or any other of his senses for that matter. Indeed, he constructs Saddest Music so that the mock-solemnity of Roderick, and the tragedy of Fydoor, resemble the stoical, eternal struggles of the proletariat – with appropriate montage to match – straight out of Eisentstein. However, he mixes that with the decadence of the Golden Age of Hollywood, with Rossellini over-playing (and over made-up) in the style of Joan Crawford, De Madeiros a Louise Brooks, and McKinney a John Doe matinee idol, complete with pencil moustache. The themes and plot twists are a concoction of melodrama (read “soap opera”) and Greek Tragedy, while the images on the screen are by turn nightmarish and farcical, and quite fantastic. Indeed, Maddin creates a mini-world, a parallel universe in which he seems to be saying “now let’s play by my rules”.
As a further assault on our senses, music is an important part of the film and, once again, Maddin juxtaposes a rich variety of forms and cultures – Russian folk music to classical; Mexican rhythms to Broadway standards. The music is never incidental but an important part of the narrative, both in terms of moving the plot forward, and in defining the characters themselves. Furthermore, the competition itself broadcast on radio, so we are privy to the noises and sounds of a medium that is not meant to be seen, and which is obliged to emphasise its elements for its audiences, yet we witness the events, performances and radio voice-overs first-hand, as they unfold, just another example of the multiple-layered artistry of Maddin’s filmmaking.
The structuralist Lacan said that we define something by what it is not; with Saddest Music it has been most appropriate to refer to the abundance of films, genres, and other influences that have helped formulate Maddin’s beautiful, surreal vision. However, in defining in such a manner it is clear that Saddest Music is not just a sum of other films, but something else – indescribable.
