Surreal film takes sadness to new lows

There are strange films, stranger films and then what Guy Maddin puts on the screen.

I’ve seen only two of this Canadian filmmaker’s movies. The first was a brilliant short titled “The Heart of the World,” which ended up making New York Times writer A.O. Scott’s top 10 list for 2000.

The second was “The Saddest Music in the World,” a Maddin film that opens Saturday for a six-day run at The Met.

How you respond to it is likely going to depend on how well you react to Maddin’s weird worldview, which is every bit as original as it is stupefying.

In brief, “The Saddest Music in the World” is the story of Chester Kent (Mark McKinney, formerly of “Kids in the Hall” and “Saturday Night Live”), a down-on-his-luck producer of Broadway musicals. The year is 1933, and the Great Depression has swept across North America like a zephyr on speed, leaving entrepreneurs such as Kent looking for new ways to make a buck.

Chester decides to return to his hometown of Winnipeg and compete in a musical competition sponsored by the legless beer hall queen, Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini). Seems Lady Port-Huntley was doubly victimized: When one of her legs was crushed in a car accident, her doctor lover (David Fox), unfortunately drunk, operated – and amputated the wrong limb.

The doctor happened to be Chester’s father.

But that’s just the beginning of the surrealism. The musical competition has teams of performers facing off, each singing its version of the saddest music in the world. And so you have Mexican mariachis, African drummers, Scottish bagpipers, a Serbian dressed like Rasputin (Ross McMillan) – who just happens to be Chester’s brother – and even Chester’s father vying for the $25,000 first prize.

And we’re not even getting to Chester’s nymphomaniacal amnesiac girlfriend (Maria de Medeiros), the fact that competition losers fall into a huge tank of beer, the tape worm that acts as a seer or the film’s ultimate moment – when Lady Port-Huntley stands on a pair of glass legs filled with her own beer.

The problem with “The Saddest Music in the World” is not that it isn’t original, not that it isn’t filled with moments of hilarity, not that Maddin shot in the messy black and white of a film that might have been stored in a vault for six decades. No, the problem is that it just can’t maintain its energy for the full 99-minute running time.

Speculation was that Maddin cut “The Heart of the World” from feature length to its final five-minute running time. If so, he should have considered doing the same with “The Saddest Music in the World.”

A person can stand only so much sadness.

Not to mention strangeness.