Archangel (1991) & The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

I've been watching some Guy Maddin stuff lately. If you don't know who he is, you should simply plant yourself on the sofa and enjoy any of his weird, dreamy films: like very few other directors, Maddin is madly in love with movies, with experimentation, the strange glow of the moving images. Maddin makes movies like it was 1923, and this is not only true because he draws heavily on techniques and ploys used in silent films - his films also evoke the playful exploration that is so characteristic of film from the early era. Archangel is the type of film you could sit down to watch in the middle of the night, perhaps after a long, boozy night or a rough day when all you want to do is the fall asleep. You see, Archangel is the stuff of dreams, or nightmares. On the face of it, this is "historical drama" but I guess this is more psycho-history than the usual sober presentations of battles and losses. The story is set in 1919. World War I is ending and we're in northern Russia, where there has been Canadian soldiers have been engaged in fighting. John Boles has lost a leg and a lover. We follow his eerie path in re-assembling his past - Archangel takes us to the sprawling depths of memory, or amnesia (DOUBLE amnesia as a matter of fact!) and Maddin brings us there employing all the tricks in the book, and tricks he has invented himself, such as dubbed voices which do not really match the images. Arctic winter, battles (some warriors dressed in evening wear...?), and ROMANCE of course! Deranged romance. Leyland Kirby should've crafted the soundtrack.

The saddest music in the world, a later film, is equally hallucinatory but not as melancholy - it's even more whimsical than Archangel, but plenty of fun at least some of the time. So the big question is posed by a beer baroness: WHAT is the saddest music of the world? She arranges a competition, and the film follows the eerie amputee baroness and the strange competitors, all sad-sack and bizarre types playing you some sad tunes. The story is an endlessly whirling tale of family tragedies, betrayal, love, legs made of glass and - beer. A funny fact about the movie is that it is somehow, at least to some extent, based on a novel by ... Kazuo Ishiguro! I guess The Saddest Music in the World is as far you can get from Remains of the day. I mean, I can't for my life imagine Anthony Hopkins together with a talking tapeworm. The film is mostly in b&w but color is sometimes used as spectacular embellishment. Meandering and demented - I liked it. What better motto could you think of than: "if you're sad, and like beer, then I'm your lady!"