The Saddest Music in the World
| The Saddest Music in the World | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Directed by | Guy Maddin |
| Produced by |
Niv Fichman Daniel Iron Jody Shapiro Executive Producer Atom Egoyan |
| Written by |
Screenplay: Guy Maddin George Toles |
| Starring |
Isabella Rossellini Mark McKinney Maria de Medeiros David Fox Ross McMillan Louis Negin |
| Music by | Christopher Dedrick |
| Cinematography | Luc Montpellier |
| Edited by | David Wharnsby |
| Distributed by |
IFC Films (US theatrical) MGM (North America DVD) |
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Release date
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September 07, 2003 (Canada) October 25, 2003 (UK) February 14, 2004 (US) |
|
Running time
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99 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Budget | CAD $3.8 million (estimated) |
The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin, budgeted at $3.8-million (a large budget relative to the average Canadian film) and shot over 24 days. The film was Maddin's first collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, who subsequently appeared in a number of Maddin's films, and co-created a film with him about her father Roberto Rossellini.
Maddin and co-writer George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by Booker Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest – to determine which country’s music was the saddest" but otherwise re-wrote. Like most of Guy Maddin's films, The Saddest Music in the World is filmed in a style that imitates late 1920s and early 1930s cinema, with grainy black-and-white photography, slightly out-of-sync sound and expressionist art design. A few scenes are filmed in colour, in a manner that imitates early two-strip Technicolor.
During the Great Depression in 1933 in Winnipeg, Canada, baroness Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) announces a competition to find the saddest music in the world, as a publicity stunt to promote her company, Muskeg Beer, as Prohibition is about to end in the United States. The prize is $25,000 "Depression-era dollars" and musicians from all over the world pour into Winnipeg to compete. Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), a failing Broadway producer, decides to enter the contest representing America, even though he is Canadian and originally from Winnipeg. An old fortune teller predicts his doom, but Chester mocks this prediction by having his nymphomaniac amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) masturbate him. Also entering the contest are Chester's father Fyodor (David Fox), representing Canada, and his brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), representing Serbia as "Gavrilo the Great" (even though he is also Canadian).
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Wikipedia