The Saddest Music in the World (2004)
The worst movie in the world.
Well, not really, but it certainly
isn't one that is worth watching. And it certainly
isn't the film we expect when going to see a movie
called "The Saddest Music in the World." The premise
sounds really promising: Isabella Rossellini plays
a beer brewery heiress who holds a contest to find
the saddest music in the world. Anyone expecting a
brooding and melancholy film in the Merchant/Ivory
style will be sorely disappointed.
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, who
seems to insist on weirdness for the sake of being
weird in his work, creates a odd vision of depression-era
Winnipeg. In fact, everything about this film is weird.
The story is odd, the cinematography is odd, the acting
is odd, the characters are odd, the sets and locales
are odd. It's all odd. Now, granted, none of this
is odd for any particular reason. It's just odd for
the sake of oddness.
The only reason to see "The Saddest
Music in the World" is if you are a huge "Kids in
the Hall" fan and love Mark McKinney so much that
you have to see everything he is in. At first I was
impressed with McKinney and impressed with the fact
that Maddin would use him in this film. But eventually
the film denigrates into an ode to weirdness (that
cannot top Matthew Barney's "Cremaster" series) and
McKinney seems stuck in a bad short skit for his series
which has gone awry. It just goes on and on, never
making sense and never getting better until it simply
infuriates the viewer intensely and then ends.
I don't know what this film is supposed
to be or what it is supposed to be about. Well, yeah
I do: It's about 90 minutes too long and about the
biggest waste of eight bucks to be found in an arthouse
this year.
Note:
Atom Egoyan is a producer.
The film won some Genie awards in
Canada.
The film played some film festivals
in 2003 before being given an arthouse release in
April 2004 in the U.S.
Viewed at the Dobie in June 2004.
