Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World doesn't look like any other movie. Or rather, it looks like a host of other movies--the more intimate of the tumultuous works of such early vision-and-rhythm giants as D.W. Griffith and Abel Gance; the spidery-poetic imaginings of F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Carl Dreyer; the exotic-hypnotic bijoux of Josef von Sternberg; the pulsating output of that one-man genre Jean Vigo; 1930s Warner Brothers musicals; fantasy and horror movies from pioneer Georges Méliès to the Hollywood-studio-era camp master James Whale; experimental underground movies from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's infamous Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'or (1930) to David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977); the creepy-decrepit stop-motion animation of the the Brothers Quay; in sum, any and all black-and-white movies with fearlessly heightened style. The Saddest Music in the World has the forlorn luster of some impossible combination of all those movies playing on a fuzzy TV inside a cloudy snow globe. In addition, the characters move around on what are plainly sets (as in the most diorama-like of silent movies), the process shots look like process shots, the film speed varies in little jogs, and the sound is intentionally antiquated--sometimes the voices and music are muffled, as if from inadequate recording equipment, and sometimes the speakers are slightly out of sync with the soundtrack.

Maddin and his cinematographer Luc Montpellier and production designer Matthew Davies haven't made a replica of any particular predecessor but rather have externalized the effect older movies have on those of us who love them. If you are at all romantic about black-and-white movies The Saddest Music in the World is pitched at you, but it doesn't simply let you indulge your nostalgia. First of all, the experiences the characters undergo are too improbably extreme for you to identify with. But even if you could, Maddin's stirring visuals take precedence over the story, and yet the imagery, while dazzling, is purposefully clumsy, so you can never look past it and get swallowed up by the movie. The look and the story work in tandem to create an experience of total irony.

Not that the story isn't memorable, in its way. In Great-Depression-era Winnipeg Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), a tough, cynical, and legless brewery magnate, launches an international contest to reward the nation with the saddest music. Her goal is to position her beer at the forefront of world attention in anticipation of the end of Prohibition in America. Among the contestants are Fyodor (David Fox), an alcoholic ex-doctor she had an affair with back when she had legs, as well as his two sons, Chester (Mark McKinney) and Roderick (Ross McMillan). The family is Canadian (Fyodor sings a drippy song about red maple leaves in the contest), but Chester insists he's American and puts American sadness over with show biz oomph, while Roderick insists he's Serbian (and is obsessed with Gavrilo Princip whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand led to the Great War), wears a fake moustache and black veil, and plays morose cello music in mourning for his dead son and his wife Narcissa who has vanished.