Guy Maddin is a filmmaker I’ve heard a lot of. Not good, not bad, but weird. So, it is no surprise that his hundred minute long 2004 film The Saddest Music In The World is not good, not bad, but simply weird.

Visually, however, it’s a truly brilliant work, with color freely mixing with black and white, on contrived sets that evoke German Expressionism from the 1920s, and with Vaseline smeared on the lenses to give it a softer look. It also has a grainier feel in some sections, and reputedly was shot on 8mm film, then blown up to make it even grainier looking, as if it was just uncovered from some old studio’s vault.

The only other recent film that I’ve seen that invokes such a different place, time, and world view was Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, which was also set in the 1930s. However, whereas that film was an homage to the classic serials and set in New York City, and global vista, and shot all on blue screen, this film is set in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada, and the world comes to Winnipeg, which has been chosen by the London Times as the world capital of sorrow, four years running.

Reputedly, the film is based upon a screenplay by the highly regarded novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (most famous for The Remains Of The Day) to which Maddin and co-writer George Toles added their own idiosyncratic spin.

The plot is rather thin, and follows a legless and blondly bewigged beer baroness, Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), who decides to capitalize on the impending revocation of Prohibition in America top make a killing. She decides to hold a musical contest to determine the saddest music in the world, and offers a prize of $25,000.

This brings out a father and his two sons who try to win the prize. We see through flashbacks how the baroness lost her legs, when the drunk doctor father, Fyodor Kent (David Fox, a dead ringer for a younger Darren McGavin), cut off both her legs, after one of the sons, faux stage play producer Chester (Mark McKinney), crashed the car. That son was sleeping with the baroness, and cuckolding the father. He arrives in Winnipeg with his mnemonically challenged lover Narcissa (Maria De Medeiros), who believes fortunetellers because of a telepathic tapeworm in her gut.

Fyodor comes to represent Canada in the contest, while Chester represents the USA. His cellist brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) represents Serbia, and is an acclaimed musician whose wife left him after their son died. He is haunted by that and the fact that it was a Serbian who started the Great War (this is 1933, so the term World War One was inapplicable then).