AllMovie

A feverish whirligig of a movie, The Saddest Music in the World finds Canadian director Guy Maddin continuing his career-long excavation of the dead idioms of cinema past. Coming on the heels of Dracula, Pages From a Virgin's Diary and the exhilarating short The Heart of the World, a masterpiece that signaled his resurgence, this is the closest the cult favorite has come to mainstream acceptance. The movie is set in Depression-era Winnipeg, home of beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), who sponsors a competition to find the world's saddest music. The contest sets in motion a convoluted melodrama that incorporates some of Maddin's obsessions: amnesia, sibling rivalry, love triangles, and World War I. Like most of his works, the movie seems to have been unearthed from the vaults of an alternate film history. The rich black-and-white, the crackly soundtrack, and the blatant artifice are all redolent of a half-remembered film language. A critique of American pop's engulfment of global culture, the movie also has something to say about how public expressions of grief end up trivializing the subjects of their tributes. Boasting his biggest cast and budget to date, it's Maddin's richest movie yet, and cements his status as one of contemporary cinema's most original auteurs.