The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

Directed by
Guy Maddin

Writing credits
Kazuo Ishiguro (original screenplay)
Guy Maddin (screenplay) ...
(more)

Add to MyMovies Photos IMDbPro Details

Genre: Drama / Musical / Romance / Fantasy / Comedy (more)

Tagline: "If you're sad, and like beer, I'm your lady."

Plot Outline: A sort-of musical set in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, where a beer
baroness organizes a contest to find the saddest music in the world. Musicians from around
the world descend on the city to try and win first place - a $25,000 prize.

User Comments: The Saddest Music In The World

User Rating: 7.0/10 (1,456 votes)

Cast overview, first billed only:

Mark McKinney .... Chester Kent
Isabella Rossellini .... Lady Helen Port-Huntley
Maria de Medeiros .... Narcissa
David Fox .... Fyodor Kent
Ross McMillan .... Roderick Kent/Gravillo the Great
Louis Negin .... Blind Seer
Darcy Fehr .... Teddy
Claude Dorge .... Duncan Elksworth
Talia Pura .... Mary
Jeff Sutton .... Young Chester
Graeme Valentin .... Young Roderick
Maggie Nagle .... Chester's Mother
Victor Cowie .... Man in Bar
Jessica Burleson .... Lady's Secretary
Wayne Nicklas .... Boardmember
(more)

MPAA: Rated R for some sexuality and violent images.

Runtime: Canada:99 min (Toronto International Film Festival) / UK:101 min / USA:99 min
Country: Canada
Language: English
Color: Black and White / Color
Sound Mix: Dolby Digital
Certification: France:U / Australia:M / Hong Kong:IIB / Canada:PG / Finland:K-15 /
Singapore:NC-16 / UK:15 / USA:R

Trivia: Some actors are given an "additional camera" credit, as they shot footage on handheld
Super8 cameras. (more)

Quotes: Mary: No one can beat the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats, or twins. (more)

Awards: 6 wins & 5 nominations

User Comments:

The Saddest Music In The World, 24 June 2005

Author: cultfilmfan from Canada

The Saddest Music In The World, is based on an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. The
film is set in the 1930's in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada during the Great Depression. A beer
baroness named Lady Port-Huntley, announces that she will be having a contest where people
from countries all over the world will compete and play music and the country with the
saddest music will win twenty five thousand dollars. An American named Chester Kent, who
used to have a relationship with Lady Port-Huntley, wants to win the contest and plans to use
the current girl he is with named Narcissa, as the singer. Chester's father is also entering the
contest as is his brother Roderick, who thinks he can play a sad song seeing as his son had
died several years ago and his wife left him. Soon, Roderick begins to believe that Narcissa, is
his wife who left him. The only person who has never seemed to be affected by sadness is
Chester. He saw his mom die as a child but has never cried in his life and has always been
happy. But now he needs to find a way to write some sad songs to win the big prize. Winner
of The Chlotrudis Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at The Chlotrudis Awards, The DGC
Craft Award for Outstanding Achievement In Production Design For A Feature Film at The
Directors Guild of Canada, The Genie Award for Best Achievement In Costume Design, Best
Achievement In Editing and Best Achievement In Music - Original Score at The Genie
Awards and The Film Discovery Jury Award for Best Director (Guy Maddin, who also wrote
the film's screenplay) at The U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. The Saddest Music In The World,
has good direction, a good adapted screenplay, good performances from everyone involved,
good original music, good cinematography, good film editing, good production design, good
set decoration, good costume design and good makeup. The Saddest Music In The World, is a
great looking film. The film is in black and white and is grainy and made to look like a film
made in the early 1900's and it really does (which may turn some viewers off). The actors also
do a great job and all the people who worked behind the camera on the sets, costumes,
makeup and cinematography should really be applauded. This is a really great looking film
and is very well made. Other than being very impressed by the visuals and the way the film
was made it really didn't do too much for me. The film is very offbeat and it has some very
clever and sometimes brilliant scenes but the movie doesn't work as a whole. At times it gets
confusing and pretty muddled and even boring at times. I liked what the film was trying to do
and I think if it was a little more focused then it would have been a great film but the result we
get is not. It's not a terrible film but I'am mostly rating it this high because of the film's visuals
and the way it was made and not for the film itself.

The Saddest Music in the World (2004)

Roger Ebert / May 14, 2004

also available at rogerebert.com: review || printable review

So many movies travel the same weary roads. So few imagine entirely original worlds. Guy
Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World" exists in a time and place we have never seen
before, although it claims to be set in Winnipeg in 1933. The city, we learn, has been chosen
by the London Times, for the fourth year in a row, as "the world capital of sorrow." Here Lady
Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) has summoned entries for a contest which will award
$25,000 "in Depression Era dollars" to the performer of the saddest music.

This plot suggests no doubt some kind of camp musical, a sub-Monty Python comedy. What
Maddin makes of it is a comedy, yes, but also an eerie fantasy that suggests a silent film like
"Metropolis" crossed with a musical starring Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald, and then
left to marinate for long forgotten years in an enchanted vault. The Canadian filmmaker has
devised a style that evokes old films from an alternate timeline; "The Saddest Music" is not
silent and not entirely in black and white, but it looks like a long-lost classic from decades
ago, grainy and sometimes faded; he shoots on 8mm film and video and blows it up to look
like a memory from cinema's distant past.
Isabella Rossellini (Lady Port-Huntly) in a scene from THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

The effect is strange and delightful; somehow the style lends quasi-credibility to a story that is
entirely preposterous. Because we have to focus a little more intently, we're drawn into the
film, surrounded by it. There is the sensation of a new world being created around us. The
screenplay, by Maddin and George Toles, is based on a work by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro,
who wrote the very different Remains of the Day. Here he creates, for Maddin's visual style, a
fable that's "Canadian Idol" crossed with troubled dreams.

Lady Port-Huntly owns a brewery, and hopes the contest will promote sales of her beer.
Played by Rossellini in a blond wig that seems borrowed from a Viennese fairy tale, she is a
woman who has lost her legs and propels herself on a little wheeled cart until being supplied
with fine new glass legs, filled with her own beer.
Ross McMillan (Roderick) in a scene from THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

To her contest come competitors like the American Chester Kent (Mark McKinney of "Kids
in the Hall"), looking uncannily like a snake-oil salesman, and his lover Narcissa (Maria de
Medeiros), who consults fortune-tellers on the advice of a telepathic tapeworm in her bowels.
If you remember de Medeiros and her lovable little accent from "Pulp Fiction" (she was the
lover of Bruce Willis' boxer), you will be able to imagine how enchantingly she sings "The
Song Is You."

Kent's brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) is the contestant from Serbia. Their father Fyodor
(David Fox) enters for Canada, singing the dirge "Red Maple Leaves." One night while drunk,
he caused a car crash and attempted to save his lover by amputating her crushed leg -- but,
alas, cut off the wrong leg, and is finally seen surrounded by legs. And that lover, dear reader,
was Lady Port-Huntly.
Isabella Rossellini (Lady Port-Huntly) and Mark McKinney (Chester) in a scene from THE SADDEST MUSIC
IN THE WORLD

Competitors are matched off two by two. "Red Maple Leaves" goes up against a pygmy
funeral dirge. Bagpipers from Scotland compete, as does a hockey team that tries to lift the
gloom by singing "I Hear Music." The winner of each round gets to slide down a chute into a
vat filled with beer. As Lady Port-Huntly chooses the winners, an unruly audience cheers.
Suspense is heightened with the arrival of a cellist whose identity is concealed by a long black
veil.

You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin,
such as "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary" (2002), or "Archangel" (1990). Although his
"Tales from a Gimli Hospital" was made in 1988, his films lived on the fringes, and I first
became aware of Maddin only in 2000, when he was one of the filmmakers commissioned to
make a short for the Toronto International Film Festival. His "Heart of the World," now
available on DVD with "Archangel" and "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs," was a triumph,
selected by some critics as the best film in the festival. It, too, seemed to be preserved from
some alternate universe of old films.

The more films you have seen, the more you may love "The Saddest Music in the World." It
plays like satirical nostalgia for a past that never existed. The actors bring that kind of
earnestness to it that seems peculiar to supercharged melodrama. You can never catch them
grinning, although great is the joy of Lady Port-Huntly when she poses with her sexy new
beer-filled glass legs. Nor can you catch Maddin condescending to his characters; he takes
them as seriously as he possibly can, considering that they occupy a mad, strange, gloomy,
absurd comedy.

To see this film, to enter the world of Guy Maddin, is to understand how a film can be created
entirely by its style, and how its style can create a world that never existed before, and lure us,
at first bemused and then astonished, into it.

Cast & Credits

Chester Kent: Mark McKinney

Lady Port-Huntly: Isabella Rossellini
Narcissa: Maria de Medeiros
Fyodor: David Fox
Roderick/Gavrillo: Ross McMillan

IFC Films presents a film directed by Guy Maddin. Written by Maddin and George Toles.
Running time: 99 minutes. No MPAA rating. Print courtesy IFC Films.
Director, Guy Maddin on the set of his film THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

The Saddest Music In The World

from Marcy Dermansky

Guide Rating -

It's a dark, impoverished and grief-filled world in Winnipeg during the depression, the setting
of avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music In The World." The grainy
black-and-white cinematography gives the film an otherworldly feeling. The name of the
place is real, but nothing else appears to be so, not the story, not the landscape, nor the
exaggerated characters.

Based on an original screenplay written by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro more than a decade ago,
the story about a legless beer heiress who sponsors competition to discover the saddest music
in the world is strange and compelling. Isabella Rossellini plays bleach-blond, legless Lady
Port-Huntley, a woman rich in her own supply of personal sadness. She wisely observes that
sad people drink more beer, and sponsors the contest as a clever sales ploy. Her former lover,
smooth talking Chester (Mark McKinney), is a failed Broadway producer recently returned
home to his native land, schemes to win--not for his native land, but America. (Nationality is
subjective, equally attributable to character traits such as greed, grief, and musical ability.)

Chester has his own, unique grip on sadness; he deems it the flip side to happiness and asserts
that any winning number needs high production values. He enlists the help of his new lover,
Narcissa, an amnesiac nymphomaniac from Serbia. (Maria de Medeiros's delicate, birdlike
face makes her perfect for the role. She is an enigma through the film.) Chester's brother
Roderick (Ross McMillan) is perhaps the saddest of them all. Still mourning his dead son and
missingwife, he dresses black, including a forbidding top hat, and wears a long beard. In the
competition, he represents the people of Serbia, playing a soulful tune on his cello.
The contest drags on. The loud bell rings as if we were witness to a boxing match, the
competitors put on their sad shows -- the Africans drum their pain, the Mexican mariachis are
melancholic -- and finally, the winners slide down into a big tub of beer. The first bout is
almost magical, the second round is slightly less interesting, and by the third, the routine has
grown tired in its very cleverness.

What is never dull, however, is watching Isabella Rossellini grapple with the circumstances of
her legless life. The former Lancôme model can careen between gorgeous and pathetically
ugly, shifting veneers within the same scene. "The Saddest Music In The World" features the
most comic amputation scene ever to be imagined, plus a wondrous pair of beer-filled legs.

~ Marcy Dermansky