Preview
THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD
Starring Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney and Maria de Medeiros
Written by George Toles and Guy Maddin
Directed by Guy Maddin
Opens Friday, May 21
Uptown Screen
Winnipeg director Guy Maddin’s latest delirium dream opens in a soothsayer’s frosty, pelt-covered lair, where slippery entertainment impresario Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) and his loopy minx Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) have come to hear prophecy of Chester’s prowess in all manner of prospective contests.
While Narcissa warms her chilly hands in Chester’s pockets, he lays his own guiltless paws expectantly upon the clairvoyant’s block of crystalline ice. Of course, Chester is prepared for prognostication, not retrospection, and the vision that confronts him – a deeply suppressed memory of twisted Oedipal frustration – not only dredges up apoplectic emotion, but also revives longstanding familial conflicts, propelling The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin’s feverish new musical, into decidedly incestuous territory.
Is it any surprise that Maddin, an unrepentant alchemist of complex tonal combinations, has concocted a tragicomedy in the shape of a madcap musical? Ever since he directed his first feature, The Dead Father (1986), with a Super 8 camera and a minimal single-light set-up, Maddin has been cobbling together ever more complex arrangements of disparate genres for a public that remains largely ignorant of their appeal. No matter how much critical acclaim is heaped, suffocatingly, upon his films – including Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1992), Careful (1993) and the award-winning short The Heart of the World (2000) – Maddin is anything but a household name, especially in his Canadian homeland.
"Most people receive my stuff as the last thing in Canada that should be supported," quips Maddin about the film industry that has always treated him as a marginal figure at best. "And for that I’m very proud."
A witty raconteur, Maddin seems to be cracking wise at least half the time, but this pride he speaks of must be partly responsible for his ability to weather the lean times in a somewhat erratic career. In the late 1990s, he stumbled following the disastrous production and extremely limited release of his first big-budget feature, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). At that point, even Maddin – an unapologetic self-mythologizer – admits he couldn’t work up enough enthusiasm to consider making another feature film.
Fortunately for the secret society of Maddinites who have come to admire the director’s hallucinatory vision, he rebounded brilliantly with the six-minute constructivist short The Heart of the World, produced for the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival. In the four years since then, he has engaged in the most prolific period of his career, directing a dance film version of Dracula for CBC-TV, constructing a peep-hole art installation for The Power Plant gallery in Toronto, and, in a fit of unguarded self-flagellation, publishing a book of his journals, film criticism and other more-or-less autobiographical scribblings. Most importantly, he has worked up the courage to direct another high-profile feature film, The Saddest Music in the World, produced with a budget of $3.5 million, and starring art film goddess Isabella Rossellini alongside McKinney, de Medeiros, Ross McMillan and David Fox.
Is this the film that will finally bring Maddin the admiration of the masses? Does the story of Lady Port-Huntly (Rossellini), a Depression-era double-amputee beer baroness who holds a contest to find the most melancholic melody known to mankind, sound like the makings of a populist favourite? The short answer ought to be "no," although where Maddin is concerned, there are often exhilaratingly weird surprises lurking around every corner.
In The Saddest Music in the World, those surprises take shape in bizarre family histories, uncomfortable sexual rivalries and a thinly veiled cultural critique that sees Maddin gleefully exposing Canada’s inferiority complex with all the bravado of a boulder-balled locker-room Adonis.
"Of course, I’m obsessed with the notion that Canadians are such crappy self-mythologizers," says Maddin. "Every other country in the world, to my knowledge, has bigger-than-life folk heroes, national legends, et cetera. To me, the (legends) look bigger because of the way (people) look at them through these historical binoculars – they just look so large.
"But Canadians sort of fumble meekly with the binoculars and look through the wrong end of them and (their legends) are reduced to little handfuls of mythical people whose names are really hard to remember."
For a moment, it would almost seem that Maddin is speaking of his own experience as a largely unrecognized artist in this country, but he swears that he does not personally expect to be honoured in Paul Bunyan-like fashion.
"But even our fathers of confederation are hard to name," continues Maddin. "John A. Macdonald is hardly huge – other than that nose he worked on from killing a few bottles every day, there’s nothing big about these people. The pictures of them on the money are life-size somehow."
With his longtime screenwriting collaborator George Toles, Maddin set out to address this problem in The Saddest Music in the World, and the first thing they did was to change the setting of British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s original script from London, England to Winnipeg, Manitoba.
"Yeah, we took our filleting knives out rather early," says Maddin with a chuckle. "It was just to overcome my fears of making a contemporary film set in London – two things I don’t know anything about."
Of course, Maddin does know quite a bit about contemporary culture, but he’s always been much more comfortable addressing the present through the past. Steeped in periods of film history that have regrettably been more-or-less erased from the memory of all but the most dangerously obsessed cinephiles, Maddin’s movies often seem like some combination of revivalism, pastiche and his own distorted perspective. So even though Maddin’s visual language is rooted in decades-old tropes, his dialect is a product of a more contemporary sensibility.
For example, in The Saddest Music in the World, it’s significant that Chester, the American huckster-entertainer, is actually a prodigal Canadian son in shameless pursuit of a fast buck and loose women. Meanwhile, his father, Fyodor (MacMillan), a first generation Canadian, is a guilt-wracked, impotent alcoholic who, as Maddin says, "stumbles in the first round of the playoffs." Finally, Fyodor’s other son, Roderick (Fox), is one of those second-generation Canadians who embraces his Old World, European ethnicity much more than his own, oxymoronic, Canadian identity.
"By setting (the film) in Canada, you can literally have brothers from different countries, even though they grew up in the same bedroom," says Maddin.
Interestingly, the rivalry that poisons the relations between these two ideologically opposed siblings is illustrated musically in their showdown in Lady Port-Huntly’s mournful Gong Show.
"An early thesis that George and I developed – and backed up by zero studies – was this idea that European music was one big sombre cello solo after another," says Maddin. "That Europeans, musically anyways, embrace their sadness directly. Whereas Americans, with all those Tin Pan Alley, Depression-era hits – like ‘Happy Days are Here Again,’ ‘We’re in the Money,’ (singing) ‘I Want to be Happy’ – repressed their sadness and sort of buried it in an avalanche of zip and fizz and glee."
Throughout the film, Maddin elaborates on this thesis by having Chester – a Canadian sheep in an American wolf’s sharp clothing – recruit the rejects from earlier sad-song showdowns for one final show-stopping number.
"Americans are always, generally speaking, the most charismatic nation," he adds. "The nation everyone loves and everyone loves to hate. They’re the most powerful economically, so they possess the most leverage, and they can attract more people into their melting-pot orchestra."
Whether this implicit critique of American cultural imperialism will be enough to endear The Saddest Music in the World to Maddin’s Canadian compatriots remains to be seen. The subtext may very well have had something to do with the three Genie Awards the film won earlier this month (for editing, costume design and original score). Of course, the film also boasts kinky sex, beer-filled prosthetics, dazzling visuals and an exotic mishmash of maudlin music from around the world – so it can’t be said that whatever success the film meets is not deserved. Or can it?
"I (heard) leaks from the Genie nomination selection committee that there’s no way I should have gotten any nomination, that this is precisely the kind of troublesome crap that’s going to keep Canada down," says Maddin. "And that makes me very angry. Not that I care about the Genies…. Obviously you shouldn’t get too wrapped up in awards for an art form. I couldn’t imagine Michelangelo or Leonardo getting too wrapped up about awards – they were too busy making timeless masterpieces.
"But, by the same token, you don’t like it when you hear that your stuff should be discouraged – it starts sounding a bit Stalinist. At least I’m not worried about being taken away to a salt mine. But it does issue a challenge. I feel like proving to them that not only can I make my own stuff, but I really want this thing to succeed, if only to spite the people that have tried to expunge me from the country." |
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