cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Maddin’s compact silent-era pastiche shares the delirious Winnipeg surrealism, artificial backdrops, feverish melodrama, and tragicomic romantic intensity of The Saddest Music in the World.
02
Why this pick
This Alpine village nightmare combines stylized old-movie craft, taboo-ridden family melodrama, deadpan comedy, and a deliberately unreal world with the same ornate emotional eccentricity.
03
Why this pick
For the same pleasure in exaggerated artifice, warped expressionist sets, provocative black comedy, and unstable reality, this is a brash, grotesque cult counterpart.
04
Why this pick
Maddin’s first feature distills his handmade black-and-white visual language into a strange, deadpan tale of disease, rivalry, folklore, and melancholy prairie absurdity.
05
Why this pick
Its painted, angular sets and feverishly subjective silent melodrama are a foundational source for the intentionally artificial visual grammar and gothic emotional exaggeration of Maddin’s film.
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01 / THE STORY
During the Great Depression in 1933 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, baroness Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) announces a competition to find the saddest music in the world, as a publicity stunt to promote her company, Muskeg Beer, as Prohibition is about to end in the United States. The prize is $25,000 "Depression-era dollars" and musicians from all over the world pour into Winnipeg to compete. Chester Kent (Mark McKinney), a failing Broadway producer, decides to enter the contest representing America, even though he is Canadian and originally from Winnipeg. An old fortune teller predicts his doom, but Chester mocks this prediction by having his nymphomaniac amnesiac girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) masturbate him. Also entering the contest are Chester's father Fyodor (David Fox (actor)), representing Canada, and his brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), representing Serbia as "Gavrilo the Great" (even though he is also Canadian).
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Chester Kent
Roderick Kent / Gravillo the Great
Lady Helen Port-Huntley
Fyodor Kent
Blind Seer
Teddy
