A description of the plot of Guy Maddin's new feature The Saddest Music in the World makes it sound far more ironic, satiric, and all around funny than the film itself actually is, the same way that a plot description of, say, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind has the potential to give viewers unfamiliar with Sirk's mise-en-scene a very wrong idea about what the actual film is at all like. Consequently, I feel as though I ought to take a page from Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of The Saddest Music in the World and not delve too deeply into matters of plot and character. Besides, with a film as richly textured and carefully styled as this one is, who would want to dwell on such Earthbound matters? I'll say that the narrative involves Canada, music, a competition, sadness, and beer--but even these words, it seems to me, could lead viewers to expect the wrong things from this film. Better to say, I think, that Maddin's film "involves" grainy black-and-white, two-strip Technicolor, snow, rear projection, and a vision of cinema which bears virtually no resemblance to what we think of as contemporary movies.

The worlds Maddin's films evoke are singular and self-contained, inviting the viewer to immerse him or herself in them. This is possible because, in stylistic terms at least, they don't make reference to anything in our modern world; that is to say, modern film grammar is abandoned for the visual storytelling of another era. (It is true that Maddin's dialogue, at least here, has more of a wink-and-a-nudge quality to it, something I find problematic.) That doesn't mean that Maddin's films are in any way "paying homage" to a single filmmaker or even film movement. As Rosenbaum notes in his review, Maddin uses "deep-focus 40s noir composition in the midst of a 30s setting with the mazelike bric-a-brac of a Josef von Sternberg interior." Indeed, Maddin borrows from a whole array of sources, albeit generally confined to cinema of the teens, 20s and very early 30s.

I write "borrows" but that doesn't seem to be quite the appropriate word for what Maddin is up to in his films. Maddin isn't reproducing old film styles just for the hell of it. He simply loves the look, the feel, even the very texture of the works he is drawing upon (including the imperfections to be found in prints of these works), and is executing his own oeuvre in the same vernacular as a consequence of that love. It's Manny Farber's "termite art" in the purest definition of the term. Perhaps it is impossible to do so without risking charges of parody. But the sincerity of Maddin's body of work--and particularly the unexpected emotion Maddin rings out of the improbable storyline of The Saddest Music in the World--provide ample evidence to the contrary. I find no indication that Maddin finds, for example, Russian montage (which he utilized to brilliant effect in his amazing short The Heart of the World, which is still his greatest achievement) funny" or even "antiquated."

As someone who spends a great deal of time in the company of what are generally referred to as "old movies" (a horrendous term, as Peter Bogdanovich reminded us when he wrote in his book Movie of the Week that nobody ever asks if you've "seen that old play by Shakespeare?" or "seen that old painting by Rembrandt"?), I understand his impulse. To make a film which revives the flowing 'Scope camera movements of Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing? That's this cinephile's dream. Don't we all have one?

                                                                 © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004