During the great depression, beer baroness (and double amputee) Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) stages a competition for the saddest music in the world. The competition draws musicians from all over the world, including an ex-lover of Lady Helen who cut off her legs, the son of the ex-lover, who is also an ex-lover, and his brother who carries his dead son’s heart in a jar. From there, things become strange.
Quick Review: Short film serves a purpose. If you’ve got a good idea or two and some original style to show off, but don’t have a plot or deep characters, then a fifteen minute short will do the trick. Sadly, cult director Guy Maddin decided to twist his short into a feature. There’s good stuff here. The play-by-play commentary of the sad songs is clever, and the artificial glass beer legs are unusual. But there’s a lot more surface here than depth.
The script is the stuff of Saturday Night Live skits, as is the acting. Sure, it’s shot in B&W with more Vaseline than any Penthouse photo-shoot, but that doesn’t make great art. Someone needs to tell Maddin that a technique is only original once, and after that, it just draws attention to itself. The fake ’30s film-look was fitting for his Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, but now it’s time to see if he can shoot with a clean lens. There is something of real sorrow here, but it’s not in the film, but about film: the waste of an interesting concept.