The Saddest Music in the World

Directed by Guy Maddin

Written by Kazuo Ishiguro, Guy Maddin and George Toles

Starring:  Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillan

Unrated (probably PG-13)

99 minutes runtime

USA Release Date: April 30, 2004

A musical fantasy set in director Guy Maddin’s native Winnipeg, “Saddest Music” is a dark comedy of desperation set to the saddest music in the world.  Isabella Rossilini plays Lady Port-Huntley, a self-made cabaret tycoon making the best of the Great Depression in 1930s Canada.  She sees only two remaining hopes for herself and a world that has lost all hope: beer and music so sad it reverberates against the hopelessness of the frozen and impoverished tundra of her country like waves over the bow of the sinking titanic.

The plot revolves around an international contest that brings bands from around the globe to compete for the princely first prize of $25,000 in making the saddest music in the world.  It also brings her two former lovers to compete for her final affections in a showdown of the lowdown under the sponsorship of her Musket Beer, the Budweiser of Manitoba, made into a smashing success by American prohibition.

Lady Port-Huntley is a beautiful woman, ensconced on her thrown in the back-room of her cabaret, admitting only a select few into her world of quiet desperation.  When a very special stranger arrives she takes a moment from her anguished planning to acknowledge him.  As she moves out from the back of the desk, we see that she is legless, maneuvering her crippled torso on a wheeled platform.  But her legs are not modestly hidden in some discretely designed chopped and channeled gown or leggings, the stumps are fully exposed, complete with scar tissue and what might even be pieces of bone.  In the context of the sad music that is to follow, it is obvious that Port-Huntley not only wears her heart on her sleeve, but her erstwhile appendages as well.  Her legless stubs cry out for mercy, a commodity in short supply amongst the forsaken souls that make up her court.  In spite of her stumps, Rosselini is as cool as Madeline Kahn as her words ooze the pain and regret of a life of passion.

In calling to the world for the saddest music ever heard, Port-Huntley is calling out for some resolution to her own desperation and that of the friends and lovers in her past.  Among those showing up for the competition is her former lover, Chester (Mark McKinney) and his estranged brother, Roderick (Ross McMillan), who has left his native Canada and chosen Serbia for his homeland.  The incipient self-destructive morosity of Serbia is articulated in his deathlike playing of his cello solos.

Chester, on the other hand, has left Canada for the riches and promise of America’s Broadway, but is down on his luck and needs the prize money for his next production.   Port-Huntley’s former lover, he has taken his brother’s amnesic sweetheart, Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) as his consort.  His father describes him as being Canadian, “with the stink of America still on him.”

Chester and Roderick’s drunken father, Fyodor (David Cox), also a former lover of Port-Huntley, was cast aside in favor of young Roderick in the midst of an automobile accident and emergency surgery under the influence gone terribly wrong.  A clear case of oedipal tragedy; the father howls at the injustice of his son’s betrayal, but in the eyes of Port-Huntley his case is left without a leg to stand on.

As the contest gets under way, each band presents its entry and is voted up or down.  The entire contest is (literally and figuratively) drowned in Musket Beer as contestants and audience alike try to see some hope and purpose in the whole affair.  Chester’s act gets stronger with each opponent’s failure as he takes the best from all the acts and leaves to rest to drift away in the foamy inferno.  Roderick’s music stays its course and refuses to acknowledge the realities of the world around it.  Fyodor is obsessed with winning back Port-Huntley’s heart with artificial limbs.  Toiling away in his Frankenstein lab of unsuccessful artificial appendages, he suddenly hits upon the solution: a set of matched glass legs filled to overflowing with Musket Beer.  Surely the perfect solution to make the victims of the capitalist world rise above their troubles.

A movie reminiscent of Gene Hackman’s great “Last Man Standing” (1985), “Saddest Music” features a star gone insane under the weight of the world, and bound to self-destruction.  Isabella Rossellini has not seen much American screen time, but one of her previous parts was that of Big Nosed Kate, the captive consort/prostitute of Doc Holliday in “Wyatt Earp.”  Her big nose moniker came about as a result of her abuse at the hands of the drunken doctor.  In “Last Man,” Hackman’s character, the insane sheriff Herod, is pitted against his son and forced to finally confront his own insanity in the context of oedipal overthrow.  Sharon Stone plays his nasty female nemesis. 

Shot mostly in black and white on cheap, outdated equipment, “Saddest Music,” is excellent film noir, allowing the shadows and darkness of the depression backdrop to pervade the forced joviality of the audience.  The shots are grainy and ill-defined, stressing the tin-foil beer-high pastiche of the whole melancholy affair.  The high is always saturated with melancholy, as if everybody knows that the party is very much at their expense, and the reality of the depression is never far away.  The audience is dressed in heavy coats and caps just as if they were freezing from the cold of the tundra outside, and not just from the cold, heartless world of their despair.  The frosty-breath cold dialog is real; the movie was shot in the middle of winter in Winnipeg.

One of the most courageous and bizarre safaris into the surreal you will ever see, “Saddest Music” is entertaining to the max, while taking a little time to point out human frailties both Freudian and Faustian.