THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

Saturday, May 8, 4:30 PM, Charles Theatre 1

Director: Guy Maddin

Cast: Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, David Fox, Ross McMillan

Country: Canada
Year: 2003
Running Time: 99 minutes
Format: 35mm

 

Tongue-in-cheek social satire and musical melodrama combine in this expressionistic film that combines a loving homage to the early days of cinema with the sheer strangeness of life. The biting cold of winter and the circumstances of the Great Depression have turned 1933 Winnipeg into the saddest place on earth. As a marketing ploy, leg-less beer Baroness, Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) stages an international competition to find the saddest music in the world. With $25,000 going to the winner, oddball musicians and two-bit schemers pour into the Canadian town from all over the world. Among them is smarmy, down-on-his-luck Broadway impresario Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), returning home with his amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros). As the contest progresses, Chester finds himself competing against his estranged brother while also re-igniting a past love-triangle involving himself, the Baroness, and his own alcoholic, ex-surgeon father. Complicating matters further are the secret identity of Narcissa, and the elder Kent’s gift to the Baroness – a pair of beer filled, glass, prosthetic legs. Spectacular musical numbers alone can’t save the sad characters from fate, and ultimately tragedy strikes as the last note is sounded.

Cinephiles unfamiliar with the works of Guy Maddin, prepare to be amazed by a unique filmmaker whose films are unlike anything you have ever seen before. Likewise, to all the Guy Maddin fans out there, you will not be disappointed by The Saddest Music In The World. Maddin’s signature old-timey visual look, his unique sense of humor, and his subplots-and-triangles driven storytelling are all displayed here in abundance. Quite simply, if you are the type who has grown bored with the glut of typical unoriginal films so prevalent on movie screens these days, this is the sort of film that should re-ignite your excitement about going to the movies.

Don’t miss an earlier Guy Maddin film, Archangel, showing elsewhere in this festival.

-- Skizz Cyzyk

Presented By: Luc Montpellier (cinematographer)
Director of Photography Luc Montpellier spent a number of years toiling in the music video salt mine. The cinematic experimentation of videos would serve him well when shooting The Saddest Music In The World in a giant warehouse in Winnipeg. His first feature was the low-budget romantic drama Jack & Jill (1990), and he has since worked in short films, television and features. He shot Sarah Polley’s directorial debut, the short I Shout Love in 2001, and in the same year the ethnic drama Khaled. More recently, he filmed the historical mini-series, Hemingway Vs. Callaghan, the true story of the friendship between Ernest Hemingway and Canadian writer Morley Callaghan in Toronto and Paris between 1923 and 1929.