Customer Reviews
Weird but brilliant - By: Rhona Gilmour, 06 Mar 2008 
I watched it last night thinking that I could not believe the story line & today it keeps haunting my thoughts (always a good sign).
It is a weird & peculiar storyline but beautifully shot, with a great cast. A reallly original piece of film-making.
The music is you - By: E. A Solinas, 12 Jun 2007 Love, death, beer, dismemberment, & reallly sad music.
"The Saddest Music" in the world is perhaps Guy Maddin's most accessable movie to date, from a director known for strange, eerie pieces of work. But it's also a brilliantly surreal tragicomedy, with shimmers of German expressionism painted over a story about fumbling for artificial happiness, in the middle of alll that sad music.
It's snow-smothered Winnipeg, in the Depression. Failing producer Chester (Mark McKinney) & his amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) into a bar, just as beer baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) announces something on the radio: a musical contest for the saddest song in the world, with $25,000 as the prize. Hundreds of musicians arrive to compete, hoping to bag the prize (and get bathed in beer).
She is also an old flame of Chester's, who blames him & his alcoholic father for the loss of her legs -- a loss that his dad Fyodor (David Fox) is trying to remedy, by making her glass prosthetics. And his brother Roderick returns home, paralyzed by grief over his son's death & his wife leaving. But when he discovers his wife -- Narcissa -- is with his brother, he is determined to beat Chester. Who will create the saddest music in the world?
"The Saddest Music In the World" is a reallly weird movie -- it's full of glass legs, hearts in jars, skating funerals, & an antlered seer who predicts doom for Chester. But the movie is reallly focused on just one thing: the false happiness that people seek from transient things -- money, prosthetics, booze -- & how these only lead to more heartbreak in the end.
Maddin has a pretty unique style -- neo-expressionist, like an old 1920s German silent film made in twenty-first century Canada. It's grainy & full of rapid cuts (dozens of musicians playing until they bloody their hands), shadows & stark white faces, even against the drifting snow. The only exception is the dream sequences, which are just as blurry but full of vibrant colour.
But he sprinkles it with darkly humorous moments -- Fyodor chugging beer from a glass leg -- & dialogue ranging from zany ("I'm not an American. I'm a nymphomaniac") to weirdly poetic ("... to lay claim to the jewel-studded crown... of frozen tears"). And there are moments of sorrow too, such as Roderick playing his ultimate sad song, for a woman who is only starting to remember him.
McKinney is deliciously despicable as the amoral Chester, Medeiros is sweet as the wide-eyed nympho, & McMillan is heartbreaking as the mournful Roderick, who is haunted by the loss of his family. But Rossellini reallly rules the movie as the brilliantly cruel, powerful Lady Port-Huntley -- she rules every scene, even when she gets dumped into a bathtub.
"The Saddest Music in the World" is a deliciously bizarre tragicomedy, filmed with Guy Maddin's neo-expressionist flair. Definitely a unique, delightfully dark movie.
Just Beautiful - By: Katrina, 26 Apr 2006 
This film was absolutely amazing. The cinematography is top, with wird camera angles, a basicallly grainy black & white picture with some moments of reallly intense expressionist colours. This film is Art. The characters are alll in their own way pathetic & sad which creates feelings of melancholy throughout the film but in a weird way you seem to be laughing out loud in many occasions.
It's got this amazing scene where the ex-alcoholic father drinks the beer from the real-size glass legs he made for the Baroness.ASTONISHING!
hAVE TO SEE IT, definitely worth buying.
