Review of The Saddest Music in the World (2003) by Ld P — 17 Oct 2009
During the Great Depression, beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) offers a $25,000 prize to the composer who can write the saddest music in the world. Musicians from around the globe travel to Winnipeg to vie for the cash, including a failed Broadway producer, a cellist just returned from postwar Serbia and a bereaved father wracked with guilt over the accidental amputation of the legs of his one true love.
The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin. It stars Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, David Fox and Ross McMillan. Set in Winnipeg, Manitoba during the Great Depression, it is a comic musical about a competition announced by a beer magnate to find the saddest piece of music in the world.
Musicians from across the world come to Winnipeg to try their luck in the competition, but the contest eventually boils down to a battle within one family: a patriotic Canadian father and his expatriate sons, one of whom represents the United States, the other Serbia.
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. Maddin and co-writer George Toles completely rewrote the original screenplay by Booker Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ishiguro had set his story in a more recognizable 1980s London. Before Maddin's involvement, Atom Egoyan was at one time signed to direct from Ishiguro's original screenplay. "The Song Is You" (1932) is the film's recurring musical theme.
Nine different versions of the popular song by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II were arranged for the film by composer Christopher Dedrick, whose work received a Genie Award. I am sure this is a really great unusual movie.
but I just lost interest half way. I will give it another try.
This review of The Saddest Music in the World (2003) was written by Ld P on 17 Oct 2009.
The Saddest Music in the World has generally received positive reviews.
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