For the foreseeable future, each conversation about a new Guy Maddin movie must begin with the same old introductions because the details are bound to be new to somebody. So long story short, he's from Winnipeg and his movies are weird.
Weird in the way that a first kiss is weird. You've never tried it before, but you go with it because you hear it's pretty amazing. His movies are easy, too. Point your eyes at the screen; the magic follows.
His latest, "The Saddest Music in the World," is nestled in the cold of Winnipeg during the Depression, and it's a great work of absurdism, cynicism, and terrific madness. The movie, like his other pictures, is pitched in the narrow space between a silent movie and old European talkie. It's crazy and it works. Maddin and his crew appear to have had too much to drink, which suits the film's subject well.
The distinguished -- not to mention legless -- beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) issues an international invitation to come to Winnipeg and compete in a contest to see which nation can whip up a tune she'll judge as the world's saddest. The prize is a "crown of tears" and 25 grand in Depression-era dollars.
Her idea, she tells sponsors, is that there's a direct correlation between misery and beer consumption, so those from the most economically depressed countries will happily spend to get drunk. "If you're sad and like beer," Rossellini intones, "I'm your lady." That mellifluous Italian-Scandinavian voice of hers has never been put to daffier romantic use.
Soon we get a montage of departure. Dozens of valises and instrument cases snap shut for convergence in Manitoba. There's even a whimsical shot of a pair of Africans flying a two-seater plane, like Wilbur and Orville Wright. The contest also becomes the site of an ugly family reunion between the tacky huckster Chester Kent (Mark McKinney of "The Kids in the Hall"), his estranged war-veteran father Fyodor (David Fox), and Chester's brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), a dark soul so consumed with tragedy he has returned from Serbia in a black veil and a hat whose brim is as big as a flying saucer.
Chester pulls into town from America with a woman called Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), but whose name might as well be Amnesia since she can't recall any of her life's unhappiness. Chester wants to win this olympics of melancholy. (He's Canadian by birth, but Maddin's point is that America isn't really a place so much as an attitude and state of mind.)
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