Starring Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medieros, Ross McMillan, and David Fox

“No one beats the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats, or twins.”

He’s back and he’s as crazy as ever.  And this time it’s a musical.  Guy Maddin’s “The Saddest Music in the World” is the twisted love child of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Wuthering Heights,” ten beers, and a bonk on the head with a rusty iron pipe.  It’s an otherworldly, black-and-white, vaseline-smeared, 8mm blur, overflowing with dirty jokes, histrionic acting, rear projection, Oedipal minefields, general absurdity, and nightmarish narrative inconsistencies.  Winners of a worldwide contest to find the saddest music of all are immersed in a vat of beer.  A double amputee is given fake glass legs filled with beer, and she loves them.  The Depression-era Winnipeg of the film looks like a life-sized set out of “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and it achieves so much of its charm by being totally unconvincing.  There’s a fortuneteller out of “Macbeth,” a clairvoyant tapeworm, ice-skating pallbearers, bad lip-synching, and a permanently depressed Serbian cellist who only sees the world through the black veil hanging from his wide-brimmed hat.  The anti-hero is a man who refuses to be sad.  He criticizes others for faking melancholy and mourning and, like all great villains, there’s an amount of sense in his theories.

Yet, Guy Maddin is such a nut that “The Saddest Music in the World” is his honest-to-God attempt at making a movie for normal people.  Maddin has consciously abandoned some of the delirium that characterized “Dracula:  Pages from a Virgin’s Diary” and “Cowards Bend the Knee.”  There’s even a story, of sorts, although there are all kinds of logic problems and “don’t ask” kind of plot turns.  It’s all a difference of degrees.  He’s just that crazy.  And Canadian.

The seed of “The Saddest Music in the World” actually began with Kazuo Ishiguro—no kidding, the author of “Remains of the Day”—and is a deranged meditation on sadness itself.  How we grieve, why we grieve, and are we really grieving at all.  This a film where we never know if we’re supposed to laugh or cry.  I spent most my time with a frozen, smiling grimace on my face.  “The Saddest Music” incorporates many of Maddin’s favorite themes, including fathers and sons competing for women, comical mutilation, and a dream-like lack of personal responsibility, in which people can be needlessly cruel and sexually unfaithful but no one seems to notice or remember a few minutes later.

It’s 1933 and legless beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini, still a babe in middle-age with a phony wig and missing limbs) finances a worldwide competition to find the saddest music in the world.  In true old-movie style, all the applicants are the most archetypal representations of their countries:  the Scotsmen play bagpipes, the Africans beat drums, the Germans play tubas, the Spaniards do flamenco dances, and so on and so forth.  Winners are dumped in the aforementioned vat of beer.

We focus on a group of applicants, the Kent family, a mobile soap opera with issues aplenty.  Dad Fyodor (David Fox, like a super-duper Canadian version of Jack Lemmon from “Glengarry Glen Ross”) and son Chester (“Kids in the Hall” kid Mark McKinney) were both once in love with Lady Port-Huntley.  Fyodor is a war veteran and the doctor who sawed off Port-Huntley’s legs when he was too drunk to determine which leg was good and which was trapped under an overturned car.  Chester is a man who has never admitted to being sad, not when his lover’s legs were cut off, not when his mother died.  He is perpetually chirpy, like a bland 1950s salesperson.  Since America is his adopted country, he declares that his entry into the contest will be “vulgar, obvious, and filled with pizzazz.”

Cellist brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) has turned Serbia into his adopted homeland.  He is forever mourning the death of his son and the wife who left him.  He keeps his son’s heart in a jar, preserved by his own tears.  You can’t imagine how funny it is to hear him say so.  Unfortunately, the wife who left him (Maria de Medeiros) is now Chester’s lover.  She might have amnesia, or she may just be under Chester’s spell:  always forget the past, always look forward, just keep winning, never mend when you can start over.

Maddin and his production designers wallow in silent German expression, cubism, and art deco.  Fake snow blows from every corner, cardboard buildings line slim streets, and model streetcars rumble along.  The DVD explains that the movie was shot entirely in an unheated Winnipeg warehouse during the coldest part of the year, yet every crookedly-shot frame is packed with characters, fake tree branches, wild shadows, or some such foolishness.  All the musical numbers have a charming, nonprofessional air to them; this is not $5 million Broadway production with $150 seats.  Maria de Medeiros sings her own songs, including a delightful number that has her on a swing in front of obvious rear projection, and she does a dance routine that’s simply, wretchedly adorable.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in “The Saddest Music in the World” is that, as fascinating and fun as the movie is on a technical level, as a joking cinematic love letter to celluloid’s past, the movie is also a genuinely probing look at usefulness of sadness, and how dangerous it is to ignore our own melancholy.  Don’t think of it as scatterbrained or inconclusive, think of it as a free association, and think of how much less fun it would be if a conclusion was made.  Or think of how sweet it is when husband and wife finally embrace, and Maddin sucks every out drop of sound.  This is one of the best movies of 2004.

Finished Sunday, January 30th, 2005

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