The Saddest Music In the World

This screening took place on Monday, April 14, 2025 at 8:00 pmYukon Theatre

Winnipeg's provocateur and prodigal son, Guy Maddin perfectly recreates the look and feel of the 1930s in this bizarre picture.

Starring Mark McKinney, David Fox, Ross McMillan, Ross McMillan, Louis Negin, Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros and David Fox. A sort-of musical set in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, where a beer baroness organizes a contest to find the saddest music in the world. Musicians from around the world descend on the city to try and win first place - a 5,000 prize.

So many movies travel the same weary roads. So few imagine entirely original worlds. Guy Maddin‘s “The Saddest Music in the World” exists in a time and place we have never seen before, although it claims to be set in Winnipeg in 1933.

The Canadian filmmaker has devised a style that evokes old films from an alternate timeline; “The Saddest Music” is not silent and not entirely in black and white, but it looks like a long-lost classic from decades ago, grainy and sometimes faded; he shoots on 8mm film and video and blows it up to look like a memory from cinema’s distant past.

The effect is strange and delightful; somehow the style lends quasi-credibility to a story that is entirely preposterous.

The more films you have seen, the more you may love “The Saddest Music in the World.” It plays like satirical nostalgia for a past that never existed. The actors bring that kind of earnestness to it that seems peculiar to supercharged melodrama. You can never catch them grinning, although great is the joy of Lady Port-Huntly when she poses with her sexy new beer-filled glass legs. Nor can you catch Maddin condescending to his characters; he takes them as seriously as he possibly can, considering that they occupy a mad, strange, gloomy, absurd comedy. - Roger Ebert 3.5/4