The Saddest Music InThe World

Guy Maddin - 2000
Clearly pretty distinctive, with a lot of references. We have the Hollywood narrative, soft style, that distinctive look created by, among other things, shooting on presumably 8mm or 16mm, and the segues into almost parodic SRS. There also seems a huge Weimar expressionist influence. The Caligari sets, or perhaps more the Spione and Metropolis era Lang geometries, along with canted angles and harsh lighting. Calling something a 'silent movie aesthetic'; I'm not alltogether sure what that means, the framings are too close to match precisely.. but it just seems to look like a silent. Inserts, those dramatic angles (which is slightly Wellesian, as is the central businessman), rich blacks, and perhaps above all the cutting pace. This is all mixed in with frequent montage.
The Hollywood ideology is undermined as racist, riven to absurdity by the script and descents to melodrama. It is taking rhe mickey, but that isn't really the concern. That is more the idea being taken apart of false sentimentality, which is clear. All can be desecrated, undermined by crassness. Maddin wants 'real' sadness surely, but can't find it; when his film thinks it has found it, it came across to me as rather a lunge. Sadness seems rather the lack of anything, and this film is brimming, overdetermined memories and histories and styles and aesthetics (which is precisely Maddin's point).
The strongest point is surely the family relations; the father is the strongest figure, a cipher of a kind of desperation. Either than that, engaging and absorbing as its distinctive style is, I'm not sure I got alot. This film may benefit, from reading and discussion; I don't really want to criticise it, more say that I just didn't get much out of it.