Review

Guy Maddin’s latest feature film, The Saddest Music in the World, is a darkly comic musical which evokes memories of Busby Berkeley by way of Fritz Lang and David Lynch. Adapted from an original screenplay by Remains of the Day writer Kazuo Ishiguro, the film is set in Depression-era Winnipeg, "the saddest city in the world." Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), the local beer baroness, hosts a worldwide competition for musicians whose cultural despair can produce the saddest music on Earth. Among the competitors are Chester Kent (Kids in the Hall Mark McKinney), a sleazy Broadway producer, and his brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), a tormented Serbian cellist. The brothers’ rivalry escalates when they discover that they unwittingly share the same woman, the amnesiac nymphomaniac Narcissa (Pulp Fiction’s Maria de Medeiros), who hosts a talking tapeworm. Assorted African pigmy drummers, Scottish pipers, Mexican mariachis, and Siamese flutists all vie to win the prize with their lunatic frenzies of melody and tears. A girl sings "Skip to My Lou" at her father’s funeral, and a seductive amputee gets prosthetic glass legs filled with beer. Maddin’s signature cinematographic techniques lend a fairytale aura to the melodrama, as stark black-and-white blooms into glorious swaths of color, and glowingly gauzy shots mimic the films of past eras. The Saddest Music in the World is a macabre screwball comedy filled with Maddin’s reliably unforgettable, eccentric imagery.

 -- Elaine Petrov