Magnificent madness of Maddin infuses fun into the filmfest

Paul F. Agusta, Contributor, Jakarta

The inclusion of any film by Canadian Guy Maddin, an experimental filmmaker known for his wild storylines, bizarre art direction, and a visual style stuck in the cinema of 80-plus years ago, is certain to enhance the level of zaniness at any international festival.

Although most Indonesians are unlikely ever to have heard of Maddin's unusual films, the inclusion of The Saddest Music in the World (2003) in this year's JiFFest is strongly justified because the type of absurd humor found in the film should have strong appeal to an Indonesian audience, and anyone with a slightly macabre sense of humor.

Set in Winnipeg (like most of Maddin's work) during the Great Depression, the film tells the tale of the legless Lady Port- Huntley (played with just the perfect pitch of melodrama by the great Isabella Rossellini), a beer baroness who is convinced that nothing goes better with beer than melancholy music.

As she says, "If you're sad, and like beer, I'm your lady."

Convinced that she is right, the lady organizes a worldwide contest to find the saddest piece of music in the world. From this point the story, reminiscent of the convoluted chaos of a Marx Brothers film, unfolds into an expectedly unpredictable tale of high drama and hilarity.

What should have been a rather straightforward process of selecting the most melancholy musical composition becomes extremely messy due the past of the two main contenders and of the lady herself.

Suffice it to say, she had been the lover of one of the contenders and also of his father.

The fact that Chester Kent, the purported American showman (played by Kids in the Hall alumnus Mark McKinney), besides being the former lover of Lady Port-Huntley, is also the brother of the supposedly Serbian contender Gravillo the Great lends to the madness of the events unfolding on the screen.

At the risk of revealing too many details that could spoil the enjoyment of this mini magical mystery tour of magnificently maddening magnitude, I will refrain from further discussion of the plot. Instead, let's talk about what makes Maddin's films so unique.

First, Maddin shoots his films using outdated technology. He predominantly uses a type of wide-grain celluloid that most filmmakers discarded 60 some years ago. Although he sometimes infuses this medium with some color (as in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs), in Saddest Music, he leaves it starkly black and white, and plays with the contrast and exposure to create a film that looks as though it were made 80 years ago.

That is not to say that it is difficult to watch; in fact, this approach -- strange as it may seem -- adds to the novelty and the mood of this movie, another of Maddin's fantastic creations.

Because of the type of film he uses, he is forced to use antiquated cameras that do not accommodate the recording of direct sound. For that reason, all dialog is dubbed, adding still another dimension of otherworldliness and inducing the sense among viewers of having somehow traveled back to the times of the great German silent film director, F.W. Murnau.

If nothing else, the presence of this film justifies the existence of JiFFest, which, year by year, is proving to be an invaluable forum for the cinematic enlightenment of Jakarta's movie-going public.

The Saddest Music in the World may be one of the maddest movies in the world, but it also has the potential to take audiences into uncharted territory and to inspire filmmakers to look back at what was, in order to see what might be.