The Saddest Music in the World

(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on September 27th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)

Although it’s now among my favorite movies, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of The Saddest Music in the World (2003) after I first saw it. This film definitely has its own odd sensibility that can take some getting used to, considering its whirlwind blend of comedy, convoluted melodrama, and old-Hollywood musical, all centered around a cast of decided eccentrics.

Set in Winnipeg during the height of the Great Depression, Saddest Music begins with a man’s visit to a fortune teller. The man, portrayed by Mark McKinney of Kids in the Hall, experiences a somber flashback to the death of his mother in childhood, which caused him to harden his heart from then on; the fortune teller advises him to change his ways or else face his doom.

The subject of this warning is Chester Kent, a slick, egotistical American producer with a penchant for inciting painful love triangles in which he rivals his own family. Chester’s current paramour is Narcissa, a stylish European nymphomaniac who blames her impulsive acts on the whims of her tapeworm; she is played by Maria de Medeiros, perhaps best known to you as the girl Bruce Willis gave “oral pleasure” to in Pulp Fiction.

Narcissa may or may not be the long-lost wife of Chester’s brother, Roderick, a morbidly neurotic cellist still mourning the loss of his son (whose heart Roderick carries in a jar, preserved by his own tears of grief). Roderick has adopted Serbia as his homeland and often wears false eyebrows and moustache in imitation of Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand became the catalyst for WWI.

Fyodor Kent, father of Chester and Roderick, is himself a patriotic Canadian who fought in the Great War; he also fought with Chester for the affections of Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini of Blue Velvet). Fyodor gave up booze and the medical practice following a road-head-related car accident in which he drunkenly sawed off both of Helen’s legs, devoting years to crafting a set of prosthetic legs with which to win her affection.

Got all that? All the preceding romantic and familial tensions play out within a contest Helen, a wealthy beer baroness, holds in order to determine which nation’s music is the saddest in the world (this being the Great Depression, after all). The men of the Kent family each represent their respective countries in the contest, where actual expressions of sadness come second to ostentation and beer-swilling commercialism; with the musical acts battling one another onstage, the smaller, subtler performances tend to get engulfed. Chester, the “American” contestant, takes full advantage of this by appropriating the best qualities of other countries’ acts to create a schmaltzy, bloated spectacle devoid of real emotion. I can’t help but believe director Guy Maddin, himself Canadian, intended this as a pointed jab at a certain sort of American mentality.

Saddest Music is set in the Depression in aesthetics as well as plot, with a picture quality replicating that of grainy, hazy black-and-white film stock, and occasional use of the garish two-strip Technicolor seen in the early ‘30s. Even if you’re not in the least interested by all the human intrigue and dream-logic—it’s got Isabella Rossellini dancing around in a pair of beer-filled glass legs, for fuck’s sake!—you must admit it’s pretty to look at.