"The Saddest Music in the World"

Guy Maddin's surreal film looks good, but beneath its sizzly, sandpapery surface there's a whole lotta nothin'.

By Stephanie Zacharek

May 21, 2004 | All filmmakers are inspired by what came before them, which is as it should be. Although there's certainly such a thing as a blatant rip-off, most borrowed ideas hover in the much grayer area known as the "homage," and filmmakers often sharpen their own styles by using another filmmaker's technique or way of seeing things as a jumping-off point.

Guy Maddin's satirical, ghostly-giddy tone poem "The Saddest Music in the World" is filled with nonspecific visual references that are haunting whether or not you know which long-dead filmmakers, from Fritz Lang to Jean Vigo, have inspired him: It's as if Maddin has found a way to mine their subconscious rather than the material they actually put on-screen. His feverish, stylized vision of Depression-era big-city life feels siphoned from the jagged art-deco dreams (or are they nightmares?) of "Metropolis"; his romanticized visions of loved ones (including the fuzzy-edged image of a dead child reflected in a train window) stream right from the soul of "L'Atalante."

Maddin has the technique to make those references work: "The Saddest Music" is shot mostly in black-and-white (interspersed with a few jarringly garish color sequences), but we're not talking about the velvety black-and-white of crisply restored classics. "The Saddest Music" has the sizzly, sandpapery texture of old movies too forgotten and forlorn ever to have been rescued. Maddin and his cinematographer, Luc Montpellier, have put poetry in the surface of their picture -- there are no other modern movies, not even black-and-white ones, that look quite like it.

But the visual originality of "The Saddest Music" is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.

And it happens to be a nothing that could give you a massive headache. The story, written by Maddin and George Toles, from a story by Kazuo Ishiguro, goes something like this: In 1933 Winnipeg, a legless beer mogul named Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) hosts a contest to see which nation can coax the most sorrowful music from the depths of their souls -- the prize is 25,000 "Depression-era dollars," she announces magnanimously.

As in a real '30s movie, the sort made when political correctness was just a gleam in your granddaddy's eye, mantilla'd Spaniards and grass-skirted Africans flock to the city for the Olympics-style runoff. (As Port-Huntley announces the contest, we see images of these musicians from many lands superimposed over a relief map of Winnipeg.) Three of the contestants, Canadians by birth, know each other well, although they've been estranged for years. Fyodor (David Fox) has long been in love with Port-Huntley, although he's also the cause of her biggest sorrow, having recklessly hacked off her legs with a saw after an auto accident. Still, he hangs around her like a remorseful, lovelorn pup, and now he hopes to win the contest with his strained rendition of the dirgelike weeper "Red Maple Leaves."

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