Cry Me a River

crying times: Rossellini and McKinney.

Guy Maddin's love-hate affair with melodrama.

by Sam Adams

To borrow a phrase from Quentin Tarantino’s admirers, Guy Maddin loves movies. But if Tarantino loves movies like a fat kid loves cake, Maddin’s amour is distinctly less fou. Like Tarantino, Maddin loves movies that drink deeply from the well of excess, but Maddin prefers melodrama to mayhem. Maddin’s passion for pre-sound cinema is evident in every frame of The Saddest Music in the World, whose harshly lit black and white 8 mm footage has been folded, spindled, mutilated and otherwise stomped on to give the impression that it’s just been exhumed from a dusty trunk in some particularly mysterious attic corner.

Despite Maddin's predilection for swelling violins and sorrowful maidens (Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives is an avowed favorite), his films express a deep distrust of cinema's powers of emotional manipulation, even as Maddin can't resist exploiting it himself. Far from pushing Maddin towards a gritty, "realistic" depiction of personal trauma, the tragedies in his own life -- the brother who killed himself on his high school sweetheart's grave, the father who burned to death in front of his children -- seem to have sparked an obsession with the most stylized and overtly inauthentic representations of emotional devastation. Insofar as a director whose every utterance seems to pass through a Rube Goldberg device of ironic filters can be said to grapple with a subject directly, The Saddest Music in the World is the most transparent of Maddin's often opaque movies. If he hasn't stripped himself naked, he's at least down to his frilly underthings.

The Saddest Music's silly-serious story involves Canadian beer magnate Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini in a curly blond wig), who sets out to make the Great Depression even greater by staging a worldwide contest to find the nation with the world's most tearful tunes. (The idea is taken from a screenplay by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, though Maddin and co-screenwriter George Toles would seem to have used little more than his premise.) With Prohibition coming, the Canadian (despite the accent) Port-Huntly fears a drop in sales, one she hopes to offset by beaming melancholy melodies across the border, leaving the Yanks with sorrow too deep to be quenched by anything but bootleg Port-Huntly brew.

It turns out she needn't have bothered, since every character in The Saddest Music is hiding a past that would make a statue weep. For starters, there's Lady P-H herself, who's lost both legs to an accidental amputation. Then there's old Fyodor (David Fox), the good Lady's onetime lover and the wielder of the unfortunate saw. (Suffice it to say a good deal of brokenhearted drinking and an ill-timed fit of double vision were involved.) As far as tearfulness goes, though, neither has anything on Fyodor's son Roderick (Maddin stalwart Ross McMillan), driven into solitary exile by the death of his son. Lady Port-Huntly's contest brings him home, but in disguise: as "Gavrillo the Great," a solo cellist of reputed Serbian heritage, he has become the toast of Europe, ostensibly channeling Serbia's regret for starting the Great War. The true source of his sorrow can be found beneath his black cloak and droopy veil, where he carries his son's heart in a jar of his own tears.

If the black hole of sadness has a Big Bang, it's Fyodor's other son, the brash, opportunistic Chester (Mark McKinney). Like his brother, Chester has made adjustments to his nationality, but he's adopted a more gung-ho facade. He returns to frosty Winnipeg calling himself an American theatrical producer, determined to snatch up the Port-Huntly prize money with his brand of "sadness, but with sass and pizzazz." It stands to reason that in a Canadian movie, there's nothing worse than pretending to be American, and indeed, Chester is a sociopathic George M. Cohan, sowing destruction in his path while whistling a cheery ditty. It was he who drove the car which capsized on Lady Port-Huntly's leg (the one his dad amputated second), and he's returned home with a woman named Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) in tow, who just happens to be Roderick's long-lost wife.

But to Chester, other people's woes are just a business opportunity. Seeking funds for his first production numbers, Chester crashes a businessman's funeral and butters up his widow; later, he buys off opposing teams and incorporates them into his act. It's worth noting that Chester is the only competitor who doesn't take part himself. Though his production numbers address such American tragedies as slavery and the sinking of the Lusitania with stylization that cuts too deep to be camp, his cast is increasingly composed of foreigners, not least the charming amnesiac Narcissa, who takes her direction from a precognitive tapeworm.

Enlivened by McKinney's joyously crass performance, Maddin's characterization of Chester is a comic take on the observation in Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love: "Americans have no real past so they buy the past of others." The U.S. is hardly alone in covering up its dark secrets -- Canada, for one, has committed more than a few unacknowledged atrocities against its own native peoples -- but The Saddest Music's portrait of Americans using entertainment to paper over their sorrows strikes a resonant chord. If as laboriously crafted a film as this can hardly afford to be anti-aesthetics, the use of peppy show tunes like "California, Here I Come" (which accompanies Chester's depiction of the Alaskan gold rush) serves as a wry rebuke to the jingoistic swill that's been spewing out of the Hollywood sluice since Sept. 11.

What trips Maddin up is the underlying assumption that populism is necessarily craven. The Saddest Music's convoluted plot and self-consciously absurd revelations, to say nothing of its widely disparate acting styles (or lack thereof), is essentially an invitation to disconnect from the film. Maddin hasn't mastered the art of simultaneously exploiting and critiquing melodramatic engagement, the way von Stroheim and Douglas Sirk did. He's still puttering around outside the door, unsure if he should join the party or just go home.

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

Directed by Guy Maddin An IFC Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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