It’s the winter of 1933 in Winnipeg. In honor of Winnipeg being named the sorrow capital of the world for the Depression era for the fourth year running by the London Times, Lady Helen Port-Huntley, the legless owner of Winnipeg’s Port-Huntley Beer, is hosting and judging a contest to see which nation has the saddest music in the world, the winner to take home a $25,000 prize. Seeing as to the current Prohibition in the United States, Lady Port-Huntley has ulterior motives for the contest. Father and son, streetcar conductor Fyodor Kent and New York based musical producer Chester Kent, who both have a past connection to Lady Port-Huntley (Fyodor, a WWI veteran and former doctor, has fashioned for her an unusual pair of artificial legs apropos to her business), want to represent Canada and the United States respectively in the contest. Despite Lady Port-Huntley’s hatred for the Kent’s, she does allow them to do so if only to advance her own priorities. As the contest takes place, the Kents, who also include Fyodor’s other son/Chester’s brother, Roderick Kent (who wants to represent Serbia in the contest, as his missing wife is Serbian), deal with their collective sorrow and family dysfunction, the latter issue which involves Chester’s current girlfriend, an amnesiac named Narcissa.

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Guy Maddin’s promiscuous mix of retro-film techniques, including iris lenses and a primitive two-strip Technicolor process, that drops us into an artificial, alternate movie world that never really existed. These visuals illustrate a preposterous plot packed with the delightfully absurd coincidences that were the coin of early melodrama—everyone of importance in the movie has a dark, hidden history with everyone else—all interrupted by screwball one-liners and absurd Busby Berkeley-style production numbers. It’s as if random selection of melodramas and musicals made between 1915 and 1935 had been carelessly stacked on top of each other, and over the years the degenerating nitrate gradually melted into a single filmstrip.

The.Saddest.Music.in.the.World.2003.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 40 min
Size: 	2.26 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.221
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/CFD66D523713ECA/The.Saddest.Music.in.the.World.2003.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Guy Maddin – The Saddest Music in the World (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.