The films of the Canadian director Guy Maddin are an acquired taste, and there is a furtive, joyous air of conspiracy among those who have made the acquisition. They have seen “Twilight of the Ice Nymphs” (1997), for example, set in the enchanted land of Mandragora (population: six), and they relish the privilege of having slid beneath its spell. To read the raves of Maddin fans, you would think that they had stumbled upon a cache of cinematic baubles, as dazzling and useless as Fabergé eggs, that put to shame the rusted lumps of narrative with which the rest of us must be content.
What happens in Maddin’s latest film, “The Saddest Music in the World,” is something like this: We are in a frosty Winnipeg in 1933, and Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), who has made a fortune in the beer business, announces a musical competition. It will be worth twenty-five thousand dollars, it is open to any country on earth, and the winner will be the delegation that makes the saddest sound. At intervals, we listen to some of the contests: Siam vs. Mexico, Serbia vs. Scotland. The place is heaving with flamenco dancers and Cameroonian drummers, whose bloody rendition of a mourning ceremony involves men incising their own bodies with sharp stones. If you picked up an old copy of National Geographic while running a fever of a hundred and three, the inside of your head would resemble this film.
Weaving between the songs and ululations is a small family drama—although, this being a Maddin project, it snakes into melodrama without hesitation or shame. A failing Broadway producer named Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) oozes into town with his girlfriend, Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), and sets about hijacking the competition. (“Poor Yiddish—no country of your own, huh? Come on over and put a little spritz in America.”) He has a drunken father, Fyodor (David Fox), who, for reasons that I never fathomed, becomes the official Canadian entrant. Fyodor’s other son is Roderick (Ross McMillan), who went missing after the death of his child but now reappears with his cello, sporting a hat the size of a dustbin lid with a cascading black veil. Readers of Edward Lear will think of the Quangle-Wangle, who felt just as lonely beneath his capacious brim.
I could trace every wrinkle in the story—the fact, say, that Chester used to be Her Ladyship’s lover, that he drove her off the road one night, and that his father then saw fit to amputate her legs—but to recite the goings on in a Maddin film is even more disorienting than sitting down to watch it, although only just. I am casting no aspersions on the director when I say that “The Saddest Music in the World” is a work of manic depression. The mania is there in the frenzied editing, the inability to concentrate on a detail for more than a few seconds; and the depression is there in the forcible lowering of spirits. When jollity does break out, it is with a desperate sense of strain. Listen to the radio commentators who announce each entry: their chirpiness makes you want to turn around and shoot the projectionist. Also, when Lady Port-Huntly finally gets a pair of prosthetic legs, must they be made of glass? And does the glass have to be filled with beer? Is there not, beneath the fizz of surrealist shocks, a hint of watery boredom?
For Maddin, the surfeit is intentional. He loves excessive gestures, and the dialogue—written by Maddin and George Toles, and based, heaven knows how distantly, on a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro—hazes over with archaic yearning. If you think that a line like “I will love this woman to my dying day, I will shout it to the rooftops” sounds like a printed title from a silent movie, you’re on the right track, because the silent era is the far country to which Maddin has invariably turned his gaze. This is what his admirers go for: the gravelly grain of his film stock, the crowded monochrome of his compositions (the new film is mostly in black-and-white, with kitschy spasms of color), and the way in which light bounces and breathes from the faces of his players. He even rains artful scratches onto the surface of his movies like an unscrupulous antique dealer distressing an armoire. There are moments here, like the shot of a family clinging together, framed inside an icy teardrop, that would have struck even Chaplin as a bit rich.
One can’t help wishing that Maddin’s choice of story were less willfully weird. It’s not as if his movies were going to be mistaken for anyone else’s. His visual manners are arch enough without those beer-filled limbs and orgies of lamentation, and one longs to see him apply his dreamy, juddering technique to a tale of calmer simplicity. The closest he has come to that was “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary” (2002). It was danced rather than acted, and, in its gothic swoonings, it leaned closer to Bram Stoker’s novel, originally published in 1897, than any other version on film. Here, I feel, is Maddin’s spiritual haven: not the infancy of cinema but the decadent years in which cinema was thirsting to be born—the age of “Dracula” and Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” (1893), of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, all of them blending the full-blooded and the weak-willed. (Maddin made a short feature in 1995 titled “Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity.”) That is why a work such as “The Saddest Music in the World,” which would strike most moviegoers as violently experimental, is, on further inspection, barely avant-garde at all. In fact, it trembles fearfully on the brink of modern sophistication and, despite its snowy backdrop, spurns the cooler ironies that we treasure nowadays in favor of primal ecstasies. Welcome to the derrière-garde.
What a relief to find that “Mean Girls” was set among competing kids in high school. I was starting to get withdrawal symptoms. It must be ages since the last high-school movie came out. I mean, hours. Lindsay Lohan plays Cady, who has until now been homeschooled, the home in question being in Africa. Like a Wild Thornberry, Cady is dazed by her crash landing in American life, and she gets her bearings only when she makes friends with the witchy, sardonic Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and her sidekick, Damian (Daniel Franzese), who is, in Janis’s fond description, “almost too gay to function.” As school anthropologists, they introduce her to the inhabitants of the lunchroom: while the camera zips around, we encounter the various tribal clusters—Asian Nerds, Unfriendly Black Hotties, Girls Who Eat Their Feelings, and so on.
These tags are politically incorrect (and accurate) enough to suggest that “Mean Girls” has a truer and more piercing aim than most teen comedies, and, indeed, it was kicked into life by some of the total geriatrics from “Saturday Night Live.” Lorne Michaels was the producer, Tim Meadows plays the school principal, and the screenplay is by Tina Fey, who also plays Cady’s teacher. It’s always a pleasure, if a guilty one, to watch a bright writer eviscerate the dim, and Fey, who based her script on the nonfiction book “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” by Rosalind Wiseman, makes hay with the thought processes of a purebred bimbo: “He’s such a good kisser.” “He’s your cousin!” “Yeah, but he’s my first cousin.”
Somehow, this film seems to run at a slower pace than its own dialogue. The director, Mark Waters, nudges it along as though it were just another teen movie (why do pretty maids always have to be photographed in a row, in silky slow motion?), and Lindsay Lohan is left looking stranded—understandably so, since her character’s motives grow muddier by the minute. Janis dares her to hook up with the Plastics (Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried), a trio of dominant predators, and to report back on their conduct, but Cady is gradually sucked into their airless world. I would believe this more if the film hadn’t already spent half an hour showing us a Cady who seemed smart and skeptical enough to resist such lures; and I would be more amused if the topic of rich material girls had not been worn to a thread elsewhere. It’s all very well to satirize perfect white females, but if you’re sick of their attitudes why single them out as protagonists in the first place? What happened to the Asian Nerds? Or the Unfriendly Black Hotties? Or the tired teachers? Why can’t we see a movie about them? ♦
