Until recently, he's had trouble hooking an audience beyond the extreme fringes of the cinephile circuit. Since his 1988 necrophilia-tinted feature debut Tales From The Gimli Hospital, Maddin's marked out his oeuvre in low-budget fever dreams that go well beyond the borderline psychotic. His subject matter takes in war, cannibalism, and skies that snow white rabbits (Archangel), rabbinical sex fests (Imperial Orgies), and incest (Careful). Now, still operating in arthouse freak-out mode, but tapping a (slightly) more accessible vein, comes The Saddest Music In The World.
Set in the 1930s - Maddin's film era of choice - a brewery summons the countries of the world to prohibition-free Canada. Here they compete to exploit their misery in performing sad music, for the prize of 25,000 depression-era dollars and all the beer they can drink. But this pales into the backdrop, as a love triangle fires behind-the-scenes melodrama.
"Teddy, have you ever wondered what happened to my legs?" pipes Isabella Rossellini as Lady Port-Huntley, a brewery mogul who is legless. Literally. She's an embittered double amputee whose ex-lover Fyodor mercilessly sawed off both limbs in a drunken jealous fit when she fell for his callous son, Chester. Until, that is, by way of apology, Fyodor creates for her the perfect gift: glass legs filled with beer. "Any opportunity to fetishise something with the camera shouldn't be squandered," Maddin says of Rossellini's sparkly detachable pins.
The centre of the story revolves around a further love triangle between Narcissa, a fey, beautiful amnesiac involved with Chester and his brother Roderick. When Roderick, the saddest man in the world, hits town dressed in black beekeeper garb to represent Serbia in the competition, it's clear he and Narcissa share some history. Only she can't remember, lucky girl. Furthermore, she has a tapeworm motivating all her actions so she can't feel guilt. A tapeworm?
"I guess I live in a perpetual state of guilt and I've always envied people who can get through life guilt-free," Maddin explains. "I was wondering what allegory of disability I could cook up that would explain this guiltless existence. I'd heard of people who'd used tapeworms to not feel guilty about what they're eating. It would basically fill someone along the full length of their alimentary canal with impulses that they need not be answerable for because they are the tapeworm's impulses."
Whatever Maddin touches on he compulsively transfigures with some dark magic. The freezing Winnipeg warehouse where the film was shot, for example, he describes as an unearthly Hades. "You couldn't see to the rafters, it felt like eternal night," he says. "An eternally sunless place. A very cold one. The floor just sucked the heat right out of us, it was weird. It was like being snatched at by buried demons."
Maddin's films have been put down in the past as pastiche, awakening cinematic ghosts long put to rest, like the scratchy black-and-white, the silent-film titles, and pantomime. The Saddest Music has been adapted from an earlier script by that master of the buttoned-down, Kazuo Ishiguro, who penned The Remains Of The Day. And filtered through this defunct film lingo the film is a snow-shaker world operating on the surreal, sadistic logic of a Brothers Grimm fairytale. It is classic melodrama stretched to a further screwball extreme. But melodrama to Maddin isn't just a lot of people sighing and making big arm gestures. It's the stuff of life. "Some of the world's most grisly crimes have been galvanised by sexual jealousy, romantic jealousy, you are living an uninhibited life at that moment," he says. "That's what I believe melodrama is. It's not life exaggerated, it's life uninhibited. Your chest is being shredded, and your face is probably being contorted by some sort of extremity. It's a terrible affliction I tried to rid myself of for many years." Now that is sad.
MORE ENTERTAINMENT
