MOVIE REVIEW 'Saddest' is far from it with an unusual, hilarious plot

The film is a touching, unique work of art.
By CHRIS HEWITT
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"The Saddest Music in the World" is as unexpected and entertaining as a pop-up book.
If you've enjoyed David Lynch's movies, you have a sense of the deadpan humor in "Saddest." If you've seen "Sunrise," the silent film that won Janet Gaynor the first best-actress Oscar, you have an idea of the creamy, black-and-white look of "Saddest." But nothing will prepare you for what a surreal experience Winnipeg director Guy Maddin's Depression-set film is.
For starters, it's about a contest sponsored by a bleached-blond beer baroness named Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) whose legs have been hacked off and are eventually replaced with leg-shaped, glass beer steins. The film plays out like an international edition of "American Idol," with musicians from around the world competing in a tournament to find the titular tune. Winners in this Dirgelympics advance to the next round, get fawned by over by hilariously idiotic announcers ("No one can beat Siam when it comes to dignity, cats or twins") and are treated to a dunking in a giant vat of beer.
Other characters
The characters in "Saddest" include a woman guided by the advice of her tapeworm, a man who cannot express emotion and another who may have had something to do with the start of World War I. It's a giggle, to be sure, but it's something more than that. There's a sincerity in "Saddest," whose characters are oblivious to their own weirdness, and there's a sense that, as insane as the goings-on are, this is how director Guy Maddin sees our inexplicable, musical-comi-tragic world.
In Maddin's other films, including "Tales From the Gimli Hospital," the peculiarity has been off-putting, but the weirdness here holds our interest. It makes us try harder to figure out what Maddin is up to and why he sees the world as a place where creativity and expressiveness are not valued.
There is a diorama-like completeness to the fevered images in "Saddest," a sense of a place it's exciting to get -- temporarily -- lost in. Yeah, the movie is weird (did I mention that a fair amount of it is performed on ice skates?), but the more you watch it, the more you realize it is not just a curiosity. It's a work of art -- crazy, touching and utterly unique.