{"id":30748,"date":"2023-10-25T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2023-10-25T10:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/?guid=6f0e42c41e5d95959c058d6b56aafa97"},"modified":"2023-10-25T11:00:53","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T10:00:53","slug":"sadness-with-pizzazz-the-saddest-music-in-the-world-at-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/25\/sadness-with-pizzazz-the-saddest-music-in-the-world-at-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Sadness with Pizzazz: The Saddest Music in the World at 20"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cI<\/span>f I\u2019ma be sad, I\u2019ma do it with pizzazz,\u201d sings Canadian rapper Akintoye in his viral TikTok song \u2018<\/span>Pizzazz<\/span><\/a>\u2019. Fans of the cult filmmaker (and likewise Canadian) Guy Maddin might recall this is pretty much verbatim how Broadway producer Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) pitches his vision for an American musical spectacular in The Saddest Music in the World. The film is now 20 years old, though owing to Maddin\u2019s unique visual style it has the look of a work closer to 100: Caligari-esque sets and oneiric rear projections are captured on grainy black and white film shot through Vaseline-coated lenses, with occasional colour interludes that evoke the look of two-strip Technicolor.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The film is very loosely based on an unpublished short story by Kazuo Ishiguro,\u00a0though those hoping for anything resembling The Remains of the Day will likely come away baffled. In tone, it increasingly looks to have more in common with the doomer humour of contemporary internet culture. The Saddest Music in the World is a meditation on melancholy as only Maddin could make it: this is a film that begins with a fortune teller prophesying doom for Chester if he doesn\u2019t take his own misery seriously, and ends with a lavishly staged dramatization of the \u2018Alaskan Kayak Tragedy of 1898\u2019 sung by a woman with hollow glass legs filled with beer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. The film is set in Winnipeg, 1933, where Canadian beer magnate Lady Helen Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) is looking to cash in on the impending end of American prohibition. How will she bring her thirsty neighbours flocking across the border to frozen Winnipeg, chosen \u201cfour years in a row by The London Times as the world capital of sorrow in the Great Depression\u201d? Simple: an international contest to see which nation can produce the saddest music in the world, with a hefty $25,000 prize. \u201cIf you\u2019re sad, and like beer,\u201d she announces, \u201cI\u2019m your lady.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

By chance, down-on-his-luck Chester has just arrived in town with his amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros). Recognising the competition as a chance to rejuvenate his career, Chester announces his intention to compete on behalf of America \u2013 much to the displeasure of his fiercely patriotic father, the improbably named veteran Fyodor Kent (David Fox), who will represent Canada.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The music competition itself is stagged like a talent show face-off, not unlike the <\/span>Battle stages<\/span><\/a> in The Voice. An abrasive buzzer punctuates each round, and the entire contest is narrated like a sport, complete with preposterous national stereotyping. The first match \u2013 \u201cSiam vs Mexico \u201d \u2013 pits a solo flute player against a family mariachi band. \u201cYou can almost hear the typhoon bearing down on the defenceless seaside village,\u201d one commentator solemnly notes. The victors of each round slide down a chute into a vat of beer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Saddest Music in the World is about how feeling \u2013 and the art that comes from it \u2013 is compromised by capitalism, with America especially willing to transform all our deepest pain and sorrows into easily digestible spectacle.\u00a0Lady Port-Huntly reasons the saddest nations will be the most willing to drown their sorrows, and therefore the easiest to milk for profit. Meanwhile, Chester cynically sees an opportunity to shape all this grief into popular entertainment: \u201cSadness is just happiness turned on its ass. It\u2019s all showbiz!\u201d There\u2019s an especially pointed critique here about America\u2019s nefarious ability to co-opt diverse cultures for its own ends; over the course of the film Chester recruits or otherwise buys off his opponents with vague promises of riches and stardom, even roping in some Indians to play doomed \u201cEskimos\u201d for his apocalyptic showstopper, a nod to Hollywood\u2019s ugly past when it comes to exploitative spectacle and racist casting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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None of this bothers Chester, who didn\u2019t cry at his mother\u2019s funeral. By contrast, his twitchy, hypochondriac brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) is characterised by an excess of sentiment; he carries with him at all times the heart of his dead son, preserved in a jar of tears. Roderick arrives in Winnipeg to compete for his adoptive homeland of Serbia \u2013 where the first shots of the Great War were fired, and thus the only country that matches his level of despair \u2013\u00a0under the pseudonym \u201cGavrilo the Great,\u201d a world-famous cellist who sports a black veil and Groucho Marx-like fake eyebrows and moustache. During his musical duel with Scottish bagpipers, Roderick is so overcome with emotion he loses consciousness. “We don’t know if he’s in a coma,\u201d the commentator earnestly notes, \u201cor just very, very sad.”<\/span><\/p>\n

In contrast to more recent films that meticulously emulate earlier styles of cinema, and which ask us to judge them on the basis of their stylistic fidelity \u2013\u00a0films as diverse as <\/span>Black Dynamite<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>The Artist<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>The Love Witch<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>X<\/span><\/a> \u2013\u00a0Maddin isn\u2019t hung up on the details. He doesn\u2019t try to emulate the silent or early sound periods so much as imagine how those films might be remembered by someone with no access to them. The closest comparison might be another underappreciated 2003 gem,\u00a0Peyton Reed\u2019s <\/span>Down With Love<\/span><\/a>, which similarly approaches its pastiche with a certain looseness in order to keep things from getting too academic.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maddin\u2019s work, despite its brilliance, continues to exist at the fringes of film culture. At the time of writing, The Saddest Music in the World isn\u2019t currently streaming anywhere in the UK, and is long out of print on DVD, which is a shame, because this film\u2019s unique blend of cynicism and sincerity seems especially likely to strike a chord with modern audiences, hyper-aware that every negative emotion can be repackaged as content for consumption.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gone (for the most part, at least) are the days of late-night sadfishing on Tumblr \u2013 now mental health struggles are addressed in the form of darkly humorous memes that even brands capitalise on. This shift is perhaps a result of desensitisation and adaptation to the neoliberal hellscape we find ourselves in. Gen Z faces diminished job and housing security, a constant influx of distressing news via social media, and an escalating cost of living; it\u2019s hardly a surprise that the most depressed generation turns to black comedy as a coping mechanism. Maddin\u2019s film takes on renewed resonance in an age characterised by corporate-approved toxic positivity and apps that harvest users\u2019 data to sell their sadness right back to them \u2013 chiming with a situation where ‘sadness with pizzazz’ becomes an ironic badge of pride.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chester\u2019s cheerful cynicism and Roderick\u2019s ridiculous self-pitying make for some great one-liners; I\u2019m particularly fond of Chester\u2019s claim that he\u2019s \u201cgot schmaltz routines that could ring sobs from a moose.\u201d But Maddin\u2019s hyperbolic comedy, as well as the emotional distance of the film\u2019s style, paradoxically underscores that there are actual emotions being kept at bay. It\u2019s no coincidence that the film takes place during the Great Depression, in the shadow of the First World War with its \u201cnine million dead\u201d as characters keep reminding us. Each of the protagonists is confronted with their inability to properly respond to pain and suffering: Chester is unwilling to let in negative emotions; Roderick is unable to escape his sorrow; Lady Port-Huntly is haunted by her traumatic past; and Narcissa is unable to even remember her own.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A remedy for the affective disorder that seems to have grasped Winnipeg \u2013 and perhaps the world \u2013 is suggested by the film\u2019s appropriation of Jerome Kern\u2019s \u2018The Song Is You\u2019 from Music in the Air. The song has a history with the movies; it was shot for a 1934 film version of the musical, but deleted from the final print, despite being the show\u2019s best-known number. In Maddin\u2019s film \u2018The Song Is You\u2019 gets its revenge on the silver screen, appearing in no less than nine different versions: in flashback, sung by Fyodor\u2019s wife; on the streets of Winnipeg, courtesy of a jolly chorus of hockey plays; and most potently in a solo performance on Roderick\u2019s tortured cello. \u2018The Song Is You\u2019 isn\u2019t exactly a sad song, but with each reinterpretation it becomes more and more poignant, revealing an underlying melancholy that characters can only express through music. In Maddin\u2019s telling, the song is whatever you make of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Sadness with Pizzazz: The Saddest Music in the World at 20<\/a> appeared first on Little White Lies<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

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Two decades after its release, Guy Maddin’s eccentric Prohibition era satire speaks to a contemporary obsession with corporatising pain. <\/p>\n

The post Sadness with Pizzazz: The Saddest Music in the World at 20<\/a> appeared first on Little White 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