02 Dec The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

Bone Carpet

Sometimes a film takes time to penetrate. Sometimes the apparently hackneyed becomes profound after handling. It has happened to me, and once it happened to me in front of you.

Some time back, I saw this movie. It deviates in several ways. I thought each deviation from the ordinary was obvious and trivial, the kind of thing a clever film student would do if sponsored for a few decades and never challenged beyond that first callow vision. I wrote a comment saying so. I attach it below, unchanged. I rated it a 2, which for me says it is not worth watching unless you study movies, in which case it has something in it worth thinking about or experiencing.

In the year since then, I experienced Maddin’s “Dracula” and was knocked back. Really knocked back. The eye moves, the camera moves, the dancers, the story. The story moves away from the Dracula story we know. All of them dance with one another in deliberate, designed ways. This is a master here, I realised.

But quite independent of this, I was appreciating and refining my original “Saddest” experience. A film experience is partly during the time your eye receives it. But your mind often receives it for months afterward. Sure, you may fall in love with something that you largely create. But that’s the nature of art, to inject something that you and the artist build around collaboratively. The trick is to create a seed that attracts nourishment and creates something beautiful when in bloom.

Recently, I revised my list of “fours,” films I think you really must see. No more than two per year or two from any filmmaker arrive on my list of fours. To my amazement, this is on that list.

The things I remember fondly are way he plays with the nature of perception. To make this easier for you than for me, I suggest you consider the character created by de Medeiros as a sort of dream narrator. Love, sex, song, and a redefined notion of fulfilment.

Joyce famously tried in “Finnegans Wake” to create a genuine dream world, one where the images didn’t matter as much as the way they were bent and smeared. We have that here. Or at least I did, eventually.

Original comment:

Camera Obscura, My Tapeworm Says

I pride myself as an explorer of cinematic worlds. No territory is too exotic, no cosmology too esoteric, no passion out of bounds. Mere competence is not enough, nor coherence and consistency sufficient to create a world worth living in.

Lynch, Greenaway, Gilliam, Svankmeyer, Quay each in their own way imagine things first cinematic ally and then on that frame, in that world, embellish with all the things we actually see. The experience is first with the world they see that wouldn’t. Then and only then do we start to unravel the logic of the images, story and such.

Not here. I’m sad to say that Maddin isn’t worth exploring. You may find his stylistic exuberance fulfilling by itself. But it has no world rooting it, he seems content to use the ordinary, tiresome world as if he were an editorial cartoonist. And that’s the problem. This isn’t a venture into an unfamiliar imagination, merely an offbeat skit, intended as a jape.

This man isn’t interested in sorrow, which is no crime. Instead he is interested in political commentary on ordinary emotions.

There is a redeeming element: Maria de Medeiros creates one of the most interesting characters I have ever seen. The story duly supports this creation, and that’s noble enough a reason to exist I suppose.

Posted in 2006

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB