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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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Your Gateway to Music and More from a Christian Perspective Slow down as you approach the gate, and have your change ready.... |
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The Saddest Music in the World Guy Maddin is in love with the era of silent cinema. It's not just intertitles and black-and-white photography that he appreciates, though. He's also fond of the flickering cinematography, the over-exposed lighting, and the melodramatic plots. He likes the herky-jerky editing and the radial fade-to-black. In other words, he likes the strangeness of silent cinema, the affectation of it all. Maddin is also an incredibly creative director, so he combines all of these techniques with bizarre storylines that often take place in his native Winnipeg. His films are visually stunning but often difficult to fathom. Doc Films did a mini-retrospective of Maddin's work earlier this winter, and the films I caught were intriguing but also, uh, challenging. I often found myself getting a headache and tuning out the last half hour. That was even true with last year's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, which added some spectacular ballet to Maddin's usual stew, but still fell flat in the end. His latest film, The Saddest Music in the World, is fortunately a more accessible work. The story is still unusual--female beer baron throws a contest in snowy, depression-era Winnipeg to find the world's saddest music--but Maddin is tied more to the story and his characters than his visual flights of fancy. My friend Garth sniffed at the end, claiming that Maddin had sold out, but I found myself enjoying this one to the end, something I can't say for any other of his feature films. It helps that Saddest Music stars Isabella Rossellini as the aforementioned baron. Her natural charisma holds our attention, no matter what's happening in the background. She has a nice foil in Mark McKinney ("Kids in the Hall") who plays her former and maybe future lover. He's a sleazy American hoping to win the contest by adding some "razzle dazzle" to his melancholy tunes. If a roll in the hay with Rossellini will help, he's happy to do that, too. There's an interesting subplot about a Serbian cellist who happens to be McKinney's brother, and a pair of glass prosthetic legs that are filled with alcohol. The slosh-slosh of the beer makes a humorous sound. Maddin's creations won't resonate with everyone. You have to be ready for hockey players to break into song, for a beautiful woman to remark about the tapeworm that lives inside her (and gives her advice), and for periodic explosions of color that seem random and unnecessary. But The Saddest Music in the World is also droll, beautiful to look at, and never dull. If you're in the mood for something different, this will suit you just fine. It's playing at the Music Box theater in Chicago. J. Robert Parks
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