Taglines: “If you’re sad, and like beer, I’m your lady.”
The Saddest Music in the World. It’s the winter of 1933 in Winnipeg. In honor of Winnipeg being named the sorrow capital of the world for the Depression era for the fourth year running by the London Times, Lady Helen Port-Huntley, the legless owner of Winnipeg’s Port-Huntley Beer, is hosting and judging a contest to see which nation has the saddest music in the world, the winner to take home a $25,000 prize. Seeing as to the current Prohibition in the United States, Lady Port-Huntley has ulterior motives for the contest.
Father and son, streetcar conductor Fyodor Kent and New York based musical producer Chester Kent, who both have a past connection to Lady Port-Huntley (Fyodor, a WWI veteran and former doctor, has fashioned for her an unusual pair of artificial legs apropos to her business), want to represent Canada and the United States respectively in the contest.
Despite Lady Port-Huntley’s hatred for the Kent’s, she does allow them to do so if only to advance her own priorities. As the contest takes place, the Kents, who also include Fyodor’s other son/Chester’s brother, Roderick Kent (who wants to represent Serbia in the contest, as his missing wife is Serbian), deal with their collective sorrow and family dysfunction, the latter issue which involves Chester’s current girlfriend, an amnesiac named Narcissa.
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)[2] 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.[4] 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.
The Saddest Music in the World was released theatrically in Canada on September 7, 2003, to the UK on October 25, 2003, and to the US on February 14, 2004. TVAFilms released it to home video on DVD in 2004, with a director’s commentary by Maddin and Mark McKinney, and three short films: “A Trip to the Orphanage,” “Sombra Dolorosa,” and “Sissy Boy Slap Party.”
The Saddest Music in the World (2003)
Directed by: Guy Maddin
Starring: Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros, David Fox, Ross McMillan, Louis Negin, Claude Dorge, Talia Pura, Graeme Valentin, Jessica Burleson
Screenplay by: Guy Maddin, George Toles
Production Design by: Matthew Davies
Cinematography by: Luc Montpellier
Film Editing by: David Wharnsby
Costume Design by: Meg McMillan
Set Decoration by: Stephen Arndt
Art Direction by: Réjean Labrie
Music by: Christopher Dedrick
MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality and violent images.
Distributed by: IFC Films
Release Date: February 14, 2004
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