The Saddest Music in the World
by Caelum Vatnsdal, Guy Maddin, Matt Holm
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: David Fox, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, Mark McKinney, Ross McMillanDirector: Caelum Vatnsdal, Guy Maddin, Matt Holm
Brand: ROSSELLINI,ISABELLA
Writer: Caelum Vatnsdal
Writer: Guy Maddin
Writer: George Toles
Writer: John Barnard
Writer: Kazuo Ishiguro
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-11-16
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of The Saddest Music in the World
Movie Review: If Busby Berkeley had made a musical in 1933 Winnipeg, scripted by the Marx Brothers...
Summary: 5 Stars
"If you're sad and like beer, I'm your lady."
"In my pocket is a jar. In the jar, preserved in my own tears, is my son's heart."
If those quotes simultaneously give you a chuckle, puzzle you, disturb you, and perhaps promote the tiniest tinge of wistfulness or longing, then Guy Maddin's hilarious, surreal, frenetic, and even slightly sad tribute to Busby Berkeley musicals, beer and international relations circa 1933 just might be the thing for you.
This is as crazy and inventive as anything Maddin has ever done, and contains most of the themes and tropes for which he has become famous (well, famous amongst connoisseurs of weird): a film language that has for the most part skipped the past 75 years of history, instead relying on silent, early sound and 2-strip Technicolor devices for its bizarre and beautiful style; disfunctional families and equally disfunctional sexual situations, with a father and son both smitten with the same woman and both partially to blame for the loss of her legs, and the son and his brother also smitten with another woman who happens to have amnesia. Add to this Maddin's typical self-deprecating love of his country (Canada) and city (Winnipeg) and a plot involving a contest to find "the saddest music in the world" and you've got the makings of something that only this demented director could dare to dream.
The mutilated woman happens to be beer baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini, channeling Jean Harlow and perhaps a bit of Marlene Dietrich), and her would-be-lovers are Canadian WWI veteran Fyodor Kent (David Fox) and his estranged son Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) whose name is taken from the character played by James Cagney in the 1933 Berkeley-choreographed Footlight Parade and who also has dreams of Broadway grandeur. The two Kents had competed for Helen's hand years before and both played a part in her disfigurement; now, the legless lady of lager holds a contest in the middle of worldwide Depression, asking: which country produces the saddest music?
Not only do father and son both compete for the prize of $25,000, representing Canada and America, but another son, now representing Serbia, returns to compete as well. This is Roderick, aka Gravillo the Great (Ross McMillan), cellist extraordinaire, who has lost his wife and son (prompting the quote about tears and heart above) and who now wishes to compete for the prize and atone for Serbia's role in starting WWI. Unbeknownst to him, though, his wife Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) has not merely run off, but through amnesia and typically outrageous Maddinian coincidence is now the girlfriend of his brother.
The musical sequences are generally quite amusing, and not only offer elements of the backstage Hollywood style but also a game-show format reminiscent of cheesy TV programs like The Gong Show - presided over by the thumbs up/down of the beer baroness, and announced for the radio by a pair of effusive sportscaster types - most of the real poignancy that is actually apparent in some of the performances is undercut by all of this lunacy, as well as regular scenes of audience members enjoying the sponsor's beverage in large quantities - and regular dunkings of the winners in each one-on-one elimination contest in a huge vat of suds.
I could go on at length about the absurdities of the plot, but I think you get the drift; what's fascinating to me is how the sexual intrigues and the whole baroque strangeness of the basic situation - worldwide musical competition during the Depression, set in Winnipeg in the winter - seems to refract the Canadian sense of provincialism and dependency on America. Of course such an event could never, would never have happened, not in Winnipeg of all places - but of course when Maddin invents it, and offers it as a lens through which to filter the American fantasyworld of the backstage musical of the era, it all seems to make some kind of crazy sense; and though the film is for the most part quite funny and absurd it gains a strange kind of power as it builds towards an apocalyptic climax, and I for one found myself thinking a few sad thoughts to go with the smiles of gratitude at the masterpiece Guy Maddin had made for me.
Presented on the excellent MGM DVD with two making-of documentaries that are both solid, and three shorts:
A TRIP TO THE ORPHANAGE (2004) is a fairly disposable but pretty bit with a soprano singing a dolorous song as brief snippets of Narcissa from Saddest Music, a man in pajamas possibly sleep-walking, a young boy...pieces of a dream perhaps.
SISSY BOY SLAP PARTY (1995) "You all better go back to the gym, you look like you're gaining weight. I gotta go to the store and buy some condoms." A pause. "And remember, NO SLAPPING." says the old man to his dozen or so proteges, handsome and shirtless young sailors in some tropical surroundings, as a dreamy 30s sort of romantic melody plays. As soon as the old man and his bike are out of sight though, a homoerotic Three Stooges slap-party starts, with percussive steel-drum (played by more shirtless guys) and a droning deep string section (unseen). For a second, one of the guys in close-up looks just like Curly! Manic, crazy, hilarious.
SOMBRA DOLOROSA (2004) Reminiscent of the 2000 short THE HEART OF THE WORLD in that it seems to be trying to condense a full narrative (a woman trying to defeat death, by boxing?) into 5 minutes, I found this much more opaque than most of Maddin's other work, more reminiscent of difficult surrealist works by Lynch or Buñuel - I felt I should be finding meaning, but wasn't. I'll watch it again, perhaps I'll be able to give in to the Latin American fantasy-rebirth-reincarnation motif more on a second try. In any case, like all of the director's work it's technically marvellous, beautiful and musical. I'm just not sure what else it is, if anything.
Guy Maddin just keeps growing in my estimation; alongside David Lynch, Terence Davies and Clint Eastwood, he's easily at the top of the heap of living English-language directors for me. I think I want to move to Winnipeg and just sweep the floors or break down sets for him.
One of the very best single-disc DVDs out there.
Summary of The Saddest Music in the World
The dark days of the Depression set the stage for surreal black comedy in this "intoxicating" (Time) musical melodrama from acclaimed director Guy Maddin. When a legless beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini) in Winnipeg announces a contest to find the world's saddest tune, a pint of trouble brews among a fractured family competing for the $25,000 prize. As the disturbing depths of the linksbetween each other, the baroness and an amnesiac nymphomaniac are exposed, one thing becomes clear:It will take more than a pool of alcohol to drown their sorrows!Only the mind of Guy Maddin could conjure up The Saddest Music in the World, in which a double-amputee beer baroness invites musicians of all nations to compete in a grand music competition... in Winnipeg. The only thing zanier than the plot is Maddin's style, which makes the film look like a lost artifact from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari era, a jumble of Expressionist compositions and gauzy focus. It helps if you're already a fan of the director of Careful and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, for this is not Maddin's most cohesive picture. Kids in the Hall stalwart Mark McKinney is a little too arch as a sharpie returning to Manitoba, but Isabella Rossellini is delicious as the "Beer Queen of the Prairie." By the time she straps on a pair of hollow glass legs filled with bubbly lager, you're either delighted by this movie or you've given up. --Robert Horton
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