Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 290: Fri Oct 21

The Saddest Music in the World (Maddin, 2003): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm


This film, also beign shown on November 3rd, is part of the Guy Maddin season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Mannerist film antiquarian Guy Maddin takes a bold step forward with this 2003 feature, a comic/melodramatic musical enhanced by his flair for expressionist studio shooting (in grainy black and white, with selected scenes in two-strip Technicolor). The project originated as a script by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro; revising extensively, Maddin and George Toles, his usual collaborator, turn it into an allegory about Canada’s colonial relationship with the U.S. In the depths of the Depression, a Winnipeg beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini) launches an international contest to come up with “the saddest music in the world.” Competing for the U.S. is her former lover (Mark McKinney), a brassy Broadway producer; for Serbia the producer’s older brother (Ross McMillan), who grieves for his dead son and vanished amnesiac wife (Maria de Madeiros); and for Canada both men’s father (David Fox), a surgeon who’s drunkenly amputated Rossellini’s legs. Not to be missed
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

No comments: