The Saddest Music in the World

"If you're sad and like beer, I'm your lady" Isabella Rosselini intones seductively in Maddin's arch reworking of Kazuo Ishiguro's screenplay. One of the joys of modern cinema, this hilariously overheated voyage into the Freudian underbelly reaches out across time and space to Tulio's Finnish melodramas. Set in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, glamorous beer baroness and literally legless Lady Port-Huntly (Rossellini) announces a contest to find the saddest music in the world. She's hoping to increase sales of her beer, but she hasn't bargained on the hornets' nest of cynical ex-lovers, alcoholics, sleepwalkers and desperate troubadours from all corners of the globe who converge on the 'capital of sorrow' with a view to stealing both her heart and vast fortune.