June Film Club #2

Our second film in our Summer Series comes to us from Winnipeg, MB, Canada, director Guy Maddin's weird and wonderful The Saddest Music in the World.

The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin. Maddin and co-screenwriter George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest-to determine which country's music was the saddest" but otherwise re-wrote. Like most of Maddin's films, The Saddest Music in the World is filmed in a style that imitates late 1920's and early 1930's cinema, with grainy black and white photography, slightly out of sync sound and expressionist art design. A few scenes are filmed in color, in a manner that imitates early two-strip Technicolor. The film was well received by critics. It currently holds a fresh rating of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5/4 stars saying this in his review, "So many movies travel the same weary roads. So few imagine entirely original worlds. Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World" exists in a time and place we have never seen before, although it claims to be set in Winnipeg in 1933. You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin. The more films you have seen, the more you may love "The Saddest Music in the World". It plays like satirical nostalgia for a past that never existed. The actors bring that kind of earnestness to it that seems peculiar to supercharged melodrama. You can never catch them grinning, although great is the joy of Lady Port-Huntly when she poses with her sexy new beer-filled glass legs. Nor can you catch Maddin condescending to his characters; he takes them as seriously as he possibly can, considering that they occupy a mad, strange, gloomy, absurd comedy. To see this film, to enter the world of Guy Maddin, is to understand how a film can be created entirely by its style, and how its style can create a world that never existed before, and lure us, at first bemused and then astonished, into it."

We will be meeting Thursday, June 27 at 5:30 pm

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyAlgfHgrk0&t=17s&ab_channel=RottenTomatoesClassicTrailers

Hope to see you there!