The Saddest Music In The World (Guy Maddin, 2003)

[Magic Hate Ball]

A weird, glorious little movie, Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music In The World features Isabella Rossellini as beer baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley, Mark McKinney as failing broadway producer Chester Kent, Ross McMillan as Mark's hypochondriac brother Roderick, who carries his dead son's heart around in a jar, and a handful of others.

Shot in grainy 8mm and blown up to 35mm (which produces "grain the size as softballs", as I believe Maddin himself once said) with several scenes shot in two-strip Technicolor, sporting a soundtrack of bizarre music from a variety of countries (reputedly), and has Rossellini strapping on and dancing around in beer-filled glass legs, The Saddest Music In The World is the mood piece of your dreams.

[Gregory]

In terms of its visual style, I think this rates as the worst, most incoherent mess of any feature film I can recall seeing. I had decided to give Maddin's work another shot after watching Twilight of the Ice Nymphs some years ago and turning it off midway through in frustration (something I almost never do). I had a pretty positive attitude about Saddest Music going in, and I was ready to fully go along with his pretense of recreating the look of certain films from the silent and early sound eras -- or at least I thought that was a key part of the aesthetic of many of his films, based on what I've read.
I definitely saw influences of German modernism and expressionism, but I failed to see how the extremely grainy image was part of this aesthetic. It was possibly just an attempt to make the film look artificially old, I figured. I then read a NYT article where Maddin claimed that he wanted to capture the feel of the dust bowl and the photography of Walker Evans and Dorthea Lange. A dust bowl feeling for a film set in a freezing climate, that mainly has crowded indoor sets and exteriors with large snowbanks?! Furthermore, I don't really see the connection to Evans and Lange at all. I don't associate an extremely grainy quality with their images, and I don't think Maddin displays any real influence from the light, shadow, composition, etc. of their photography, for example.
Sadly the awkward jumble of styles didn't end there. He also brought in strong film-noir influences in the mise-en-scene, and used all kinds of dizzying camera movements, hand-held camerawork, and rapid digital-era editing techniques. I half expected a car chase sequence out of 1970s cinema to pop up out of this jumble.
On the positive side, I do think the film was better written, and generally better acted, than Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (at least according to my hazy recollections of the latter), but I was unable to appreciate any of this because so many of the film's fundamentals had my head spinning. I'm willing to consider that I've completely missed some good reasons he had for why he made the film the way he did, but at present I'm wondering if he has any idea whatsoever what he's really doing. If most of his viewers don't feel any need to understand his decisions as a film maker because of his perceived "quirkiness." Not to condescend -- obviously people simply have very different ways of approaching the films they watch.
Cowards Bend the Knee was going to be part 2 of my renewed attempt to appreciate what Maddin does, but I'm thinking now that if I'm going to watch that one at all I ought to take another break from his work for at least several months.

[MichaelB]

Alternatively, one could argue that the deliberate mishmash of styles is entirely appropriate for a film whose basic narrative premise is based around implausible cultural collisions. Hence the attempt to create a "dust-bowl" feel in an otherwise snow-blanketed environment - do you really think Maddin wasn't aware of that basic contradiction when he said that?

I'm sorry you started with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, though - Maddin himself acknowledges that this is his worst film by far, and I can see how it might have coloured your response to Saddest Music. Give Cowards Bend the Knee a try - you may hate it just as much, but it is at least more coherent, and a lot closer to Maddin's general aesthetic and thematic approach than either of the two films you've seen so far.

[Gregory]

do you really think Maddin wasn't aware of that basic contradiction when he said that?

I really don't know (not to be uncharitable about it). I'm sure he had conscious reasons for at least a good number of the decisions he made about the film's visual qualities, but my point was that many of these reasons did not seem to me to fit into any kind of aesthetically coherent whole. I'm just not sold on the idea that having extremely rapid editing in something that was designed to look ancient has anything to do with the mix of cultures and musical styles that the story involves. I failed to understand what Maddin could have been thinking, though, so there is every chance that I haven't accounted for something that, for someone else, makes the film work well. In any case, I was not convinced by the dust bowl thing he attempted, even considering the geographically incongruous setting for it.
I should say that I surprised myself a little by having such a negative reaction to the jumble of these styles because this kind of thing doesn't bother me in music if it is done in ways that are compelling and inspired. Maddin just didn't seem to have command of these disparate elements as does someone like John Zorn and the musicians who play some of the pieces of his that I have in mind.
Anyway, I think I've gone on about this enough, although if anyone wants to point to specific qualities or parts of the film that they thought were particularly successful I'm happy to consider them.

Give Cowards Bend the Knee a try - you may hate it just as much, but it is at least more coherent, and a lot closer to Maddin's general aesthetic and thematic approach than either of the two films you've seen so far.

I will do that. I wonder, though, if there is something specific to that film I should read or keep in mind before watching it, or if it is better to simply grasp what this general approach you refer to is by simply watching the film.

[MichaelB]

Just watch it with no preconceptions at all. It took me three goes to get into Maddin (the 1992 London Film Festival screening of Careful finally converted me), so I have every sympathy with you.