...of charm and strange: the blog

The Saddest Music in the World seems to be constructed from every image you've ever seen in the old silent films from the early 1900s, yet it somehow manages to be different from anything you've ever seen before in your life. In those old films, there is always a sense that the diegetic world ended precisely at the border of the frame. The Saddest Music in the World takes you beyond the borders of these films both literally and figuratively.

The movie is meticulously shot to resemble the films of that period -- it's grainy, shadowy, and genuinely appears to have survived on century-old celluloid, but it builds on the old style by adding a mobile camera and all the sex and violence that was absent in films back then. It is dizzyingly surrealistic, taking place in Winnipeg as it never was, drawing entirely upon images that themselves did not strive for realism. Like Far From Heaven, it recreates a time period as it existed only in the movies.

The plot has about as much to do with reality as its visuals. In Winnipeg, 1933, "IN THE DEPTHS OF A GREAT DEPRESSION," legless beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) decides to hold a contest to find out which country truly has the saddest music in the world. The winner will receive 25,000 "depression-era dollars." Oh, and a whole lot of beer.

Mark McKinney plays Chester, an American who will stoop to any level to win the competition. Meanwhile, representing Serbia, his brother Roderick is in town, donning a black veil that he could have stolen from Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice. There is also a woman with a psychic tapeworm who is sleeping with Chester (the woman, not the tapeworm) and can't quite remember if she is actually married to Roderick, but decides to find out by sleeping with him, too.

In its very premise, the film plays on the wild melodrama of the old movies, taking it to such a bizarre level but managing to keep from lapsing into parody, such as when Roderick explains completely seriously to his father that he has been so melancholy since his son's death that he keeps the son's heart in a jar full of his own tears. The characters are given the voice they never would have had in the silent films, but their affinity for passionate overemotion has remained completely intact.

What else can I say? This is a movie to be seen, not read about. It's just an incredible piece of work that amazes you with marvel after marvel (you haven't lived until you've seen Isabella Rossellini dancing around in glass legs filled with beer, and there's a sentence I never thought I would write). It's like a manifestation of the kind of dream you might have after watching too many old films. It's the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long, long time.