The Saddest Music in the World (NR, probably R) (99 min.) - Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's movie looks like a throwback to cinematic times that never existed. Filmed in black and white (with a few leaps to color for dreams and flashbacks), The Saddest Music in the World resembles a silent movie, slightly pixilated, lighted with exaggeration and transparently false in its backgrounds. Everything seems filmed through gauze on celluloid that is faded and blurred by time. It's a fascinating look for a distinctly uninteresting story.
Set in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, the story revolves around Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), owner of a brewery, who knows that melancholy customers consume more beer. She creates a contest to identify the nation with the saddest music. It's a publicity stunt to expand her brand name, and how much can "$25,000 in Depression-era dollars" really be worth? Contestants come from around the globe to coax tears into beer and money into their pockets.
There must be some underlying message, perhaps in the greedy pushiness of an American, Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), who once knew Lady Port-Huntley so intimately that he caused an accident that led to the loss of her legs. His father, Fyodor (David Fox), another of the woman's lovers, was the emergency surgeon who amputated the wrong leg, then got it right. His brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) mourns his dead son by carrying the boy's heart in a jar filled with tears. Details like those are amusing, yet never add up to much. We imagine Maddin giggling behind the camera at his cleverness, without any concern about entertaining the audience.
The competition becomes repetitive, like American Idol on barbiturates, with stereotypical African tribesmen, self-absorbed Europeans and inscrutably Asian musical tones vying for the prize. Lady Port-Huntley watches over them like an empress, taking time to admire her prosthetic legs, two glass limbs filled with foamy beer. It's pointless except for the visuals, but it's more pleasing than the screenplay's soap opera elements.
As pointless as it is provocative, The Saddest Music in the World is unquestionably the strangest movie in theaters these days, but that probably isn't satisfying enough unless you're Maddin. Grade: C-plus
- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic
Seeking a new comfort zone
Divan (NR) (77 min.) - A couch is a couch is a couch. Unless, of course, it's the fabled piece of furniture on which a renowned Hasidic rebbe once spent the night in Hungary in the late 1800s. That's the nominal subject of Divan, a moving low budget documentary from New York filmmaker Pearl Gluck.
Gluck and a series of friends, acquaintances and other commentators are on a quest to come to terms with their shared religious heritage: What meaning, if any, do the rules and rituals of their Orthodox Jewish upbringing in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn have for their adult lives? How should they see the world, if not through the lens of that particular belief system?
Gluck, warm, funny and self-deprecating, allows her curiosity to be her guide on a trip to Hungary, where she negotiates with distant relatives for the divan. In Divan's most affecting sequence, at a gravesite, viewers are given a fresh reminder of the extent to which Hitler decimated the Jewish population in Eastern Europe. Gluck returns, if not to her former faith, back into the good graces of her father, who, for the first time, crosses the bridge to Manhattan and spends time in his daughter's apartment. Grade: B
