The story works itself out coherently, but you never respond to it as a direct representation of reality. As Maddin says:
People talk about irony and melodrama as if they're mutually exclusive, but I'm not so sure they are. When melodrama isn't working, I crave irony. If the sweetness isn't working, I need something savory, something very salty or something horrible, caustic to undermine it.Anticipating his own jaded response, he builds the undermining irony right into his melodrama. (Read this 3 May 2004 IndieWire interview for Maddin's descriptive definition of "melodrama"; read this page from my new book for my structural definition of it.)
I doubt, however, that morbid-arty self-consciousness has ever been this much fun. In this 17 February 2004 IndieWire interview Maddin says:
Whenever someone asks me to describe the highlights of my own life, I describe them with a mythic quality and they were usually the family tragedies, the most miserable things. So it turns out that I find the best way of showing these things is to play them for comedy.And in fact Maddin gives the family traumas in the past and present tenses of The Saddest Music in the World something like the flagrant drag-queen humor of John Waters at his most lowdown, in Pink Flamingos (1974) and Female Trouble (1975). Everything is equally "fabulous" and tawdry (the two become inseparable qualities); overstressed pop emotionality is gloried in and derided by the very same gestures; everything is a dirty joke, or a black one, or both, and always an occasion for exhibitionism.
You don't feel for Lady Port-Huntley as an amputee, for instance. When Fyodor tries to win her back with a pair of glass legs filled with beer, the image of her standing onstage with the light shining through them as they bubble, or of her admiring them when they're raised in the air while she has sex with his son, is everything the most imaginatively depraved transvestite could do to turn Marlene Dietrich, that Germanic kitsch goddess, inside out. The strained delicacy of Maddin's style is a high-art retro effect, but the movie unfolds with the rowdy cabaret brio of camp lampoonery. (It's more fun in this respect, and altogether more accomplished, than John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001).)
The Saddest Music in the World has impact, certainly. And it's the rare experimental movie in which the actors are able to make memorably individual contributions. With her sighing voice and her disconnected gaze as she moves through the stagy snowscape, Maria de Medeiros is the doll in Maddin's cobwebby dollhouse. Her weightless presence manages to span the range of his influences--she could be the shadow cast by Nadia Sibirskaia, the most delicate of movie waifs (in Dmitri Kirsanov's fiercely inventive Menilmontant (1926)), or by Janet Gaynor, the most synthetic of them (in Murnau's Sunrise (1927)).
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