The Saddest Music in the World **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Guy Maddin Written by George Toles, Maddin, and Kazuo Ishiguro With Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, David Fox, and Ross McMillan.
As usual with Maddin, I can’t even begin to furnish a synopsis without sounding hyperbolic and slightly breathless. The film is set in 1933, at the height of the Depression, in Winnipeg, Maddin’s hometown. Beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Rossellini), whose name appears to have been suggested by Laura Riding’s great 30s story “Reality as Port Huntlady,” announces a contest to find the “saddest music in the world” as a way to promote her brew. Hoping the imminent end of prohibition in the U.S. will create a new demand for her beer and inspired by the London Times’s selection of Winnipeg for three years in a row as the “world capital of sorrow,” the self-styled Beer Queen of the Prairie invites musicians from around the world to compete for the $25,000 prize, appointing herself the sole judge. She even has a slogan: “If you’re sad and like beer, I’m your lady.”
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Two countries compete at each preliminary session: alternating musical snatches are interrupted by Port-Huntly, operating a loud buzzer that suggests a tacky TV-game-show device, and the winner gets to slide down a chute into a huge vat of beer. Meanwhile radio announcers ad-lib about the proceedings as if they were sports commentators. When Siam competes with Mexico one of them remarks, “Nobody can beat the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats, or twins.” Then Serbia goes up against Scotland, Canada against Africa, America against Spain. And it’s not surprising given Maddin’s flair for melodrama that when Serbia vies with America in the final playoff it’s also brother against brother.
As more than one Canadian critic has noted, that Chester is Canadian and not American–despite his accent–only enhances the satirical implications of this setup. To be Canadian and consumed with self-hatred means to struggle with belonging to an American colony, existentially if not literally–the colonizing process that matters most is internal. It’s worth adding that just as the success of Port-Huntly’s musical Olympics will be determined by the American market–a fact underlined by the responses of an elderly American couple following it on the radio–the success of The Saddest Music in the World will depend largely on the response of American audiences.
The mutilation of Port-Huntly seems inspired by some of the silent films of Lon Chaney, which Maddin wrote about in the winter 2003 issue of Cinema Scope. Chaney was a mainstream “A-list performer” with about 40 starring film roles during the 20s, among them a dozen features that Maddin dubbed “disfigurement allegories,” in which amputated limbs or other physical abnormalities reflect or stand in for “profoundly painful inner wounds.” Maddin writes about Chaney in language that reeks of the mime of silent cinema and the extreme emotions it often trafficked in: “Riding the extreme parabolas of passion permitted by the wild genres in which he worked, he compelled his countenance to seethe, simmer, glower, yearn, lust, and quake in compound permutations of startling virtuosity, creating readable and emotionally complex sentences with the syntax of his features.”
