No less an authority than Roger Ebert said: “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.” Indeed, the 55-year-old Canadian filmmaker may well possess the most singular artistic voice present in the current cinema. Over the course of his nine feature films and countless shorts, Maddin has developed a filmic sensibility that is resolutely his, a complex amalgam of revisionist aesthetics, bizarre psychosexual themes, and a constant fascination with and manipulation of time and place. The critical and cultural zeitgeist seems to have caught on to Maddin somewhere around 2003’s Cowards Bend the Knee, and each of the director’s films since then, including 2006’s Brand Upon the Brain and 2007’s My Winnipeg, have been representative of him. That is to say, that each is incontrovertibly a “Guy Maddin film.” It is his 2003 breakthrough, The Saddest Music in the World, though, that remains the most distilled and furious window into Maddin’s mercurial genius.
     Writing about The Saddest Music in the World demands a bit of plot synopsis, which is itself no small feat, but here’s a shot: Depression-era Winnipeg finds the beer baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) amassing untold fortunes as the rest of the world drowns its collective sorrows in her beer. To further her hold on the market, the baroness announces a contest, where representatives from around the globe will descend upon Winnipeg (“the world capitol of sorrow”) to perform the saddest music in the world. The winner will receive a prize of “$25,000 Depression-era dollars.” The contest draws a number of interested parties, to include Chester Kent (The Kids in the Hall’s Mark McKinney), a Broadway huckster in need of some quick funds. Kent, Lady Port-Huntley’s former lover, is joined by his amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa, an exceedingly curious girl who only does what the tapeworm in her stomach tells her to do. Chester Kent will represent America in the contest. Complicating things further is that Kent’s father Fyodor joins the proceedings representing Canada. Fyodor is an alcoholic train conductor who is also in love with Lady Port-Huntley and who drunkenly amputated both of her legs after a car accident. Did I mention that? Yes, Lady Port-Huntley has no legs and wheels herself around on a furry dolly, that is until Fyodor makes for her a pair of sparkling glass legs filled to the thighs with her own beer. The final piece of the love quadrangle is completed when Roderick arrives representing Serbia. Roderick, who plays a sad, sad cello beneath a long black veil, is Chester Kent’s brother, Fyodor’s son, and Narcissa’s long lost husband. He is also the father of his and Narcissa’s dead son, a fact the amnesiac of course cannot recall. Whew.            
The most readily apparent trait when watching The Saddest Music in the World (or any Maddin film) is the film’s archaic look. Maddin, once an artist-curator for the UCLA Film & TV Archive and a columnist for Film Comment, has a positively encyclopedic knowledge of film history and deploys it with reckless abandon. The Saddest Music in the World, in addition to being primarily black-and-white, is filled with the hallmarks of early cinema, each used expertly. Rear-screen projections, keyhole vignettes, intensely grainy film stock, front-end titles, and Foley sound immediately welcome the viewer into the familiar world of cinema’s nascence. If the flawless use of these techniques were the extent of the director’s hyper-referential classicism, it would be quite enough, but Maddin imbues his film with still another layer of revisionist film history by associating each of his main characters with the distinct and instantly recognizable style of a past master or masters.
    Chester Kent’s Broadway musical numbers are all Busby Berkeley schmaltz and glitz (not sad at all, mind you). The character’s name even originates from James Cagney’s portrayal of a “Chester Kent” in Berkeley’s 1932 musical Footlight Parade, and as Kent and Narcissa stroll through the perfectly snowy streets of a studio backlot “Winnipeg,” they could almost be Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in a bizarro world rendering of Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls. Lady Port-Huntley, on the other hand, is overtly a product of German expressionism, specifically that of Fritz Lang. As she conducts the proceedings of the contest from her perched abode, one cannot help but think of Metropolis. Frosted glass, long shadows, and hard angles fill the baroness’ world, and perfect pools of silver light gather when reflecting off of her bejeweled tiara, diamond earrings, or any of the room’s several chandeliers. In stark contrast to the light of Lady Port-Huntley’s world is the nightmare vision that surrounds Fyodor and Roderick. Both men are, of course, thrust into a hell of their own making, Fyodor pining hopelessly for Lady Port-Huntley and Roderick trying in vain to shake Narcissa back to consciousness, both of them undone by the dastardly Chester Kent. As such, very high contrast black-and-white film, low angle compositions, and the aforementioned keyhole vignettes put these two squarely in the world of silent horror films, where Roderick’s visage could’ve easily been plucked from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu or any number of Lon Chaney villains.
To imply that Maddin’s film is simply a straight-laced recycling of classical tropes, however, would be a gross disservice to the director’s inherently subversive ends. The Saddest Music in the World is shot through with strange and violent psychosexual thematics that, of course, had no place in the world of early film the director so ably recreates. Blow jobs, dead baby hearts, and grotesque bodily mutilations abound in The Saddest Music in the World, and, even within the context of the director’s technical approach, his classicist style is transfigured with light leaks, edge blurs, superimpositions, and jump cuts that make the archaic positively psychedelic. Perhaps most tellingly, the director utilizes hyper-saturated color in a few tragic scenes, each one a death or a funeral, and in these moments the viewer is reminded instantly and specifically of the experimental, ritualistic cinema of counterculture icon Kenneth Anger.
     All of this is the tip of an overwhelming iceberg when it comes to the films of Guy Maddin. The director’s fast and loose conception of place, for one, has nary been covered here, nor have many of the other stylistic and thematic feats that make the director’s movies quite literally like nothing else you can find in cinema. Narcissa contends at one point in the film, “I’m not an American, I’m a nymphomaniac,” and of The Saddest Music in the World, I would contend that it’s not a movie; it’s a Guy Maddin movie.