Guy Maddin directs Isabella Rossellini in The Saddest Music in the World

GUY MADDIN finds some shade outside the coffee house where we've been meeting for the last couple of years every time he's finished a film. We start with a little chit chat. He thanks me for the praise I left on his answering machine right after watching The Saddest Music in the World. I return his VHS copy of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (a.k.a. The Big Carnival), a film that drips with so much cynicism it initially seems to kid the audience but ends up being so dark it's difficult to tell.

"Is there anything better than that last shot?" asks Maddin rhetorically. "'I am a thousand-dollar-a-day reporter. You can have me for nothing'" he says, imitating Kirk Douglas's final drunken uttering right before his character slumps down (in a perfectly composed shot), dead of a knife wound. The unrelenting ruthlessness of Douglas's character in Ace in the Hole obviously inspired that of Chester Kent in The Saddest Music in the World. It's no wonder the tape Maddin loaned me had the words, "To Niv," scribbled on the label, referring to the film's producer, Niv Fichman.

Before the interview begins, I have to tell him about the contest I just covered for a weekly newspaper in Gimli, Manitoba, not far from his family's cottage. It was the first ever fish-filleting competition. Two hundred people had turned out in the pouring rain to watch local fishers compete for a $1,000 prize. Maddin sees the humour in the situation. He ought to. He claims to have made his first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), which celebrates the ancient art of carving fish from tree bark, to get back at his Icelandic relatives. But there was more going on at that filleting competition. After the contest was over, everybody just kept on gutting fish. Their manner was fairly routine but there was a sense of urgency. They absolutely had to keep gutting the fish, as if their very survival depended on it. Perhaps when the Icelanders originally settled in the area long ago that was true, but now it seems like the remnants of an obsolete Darwinian mechanism. Of course, it takes an outsider to spot it.

That's where The Saddest Music in the World finds its humour. The film is about an international contest sponsored by Winnipeg beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) to determine the country that has the saddest music in the world. There is a scene in which a Serbian cellist beats out a Scottish pipe-and-drum band but becomes so overcome with grief he loses consciousness. The contest continues as if everything is normal while his comatose body is dropped into the celebratory beer bath. The contest and the beer bath are strange enough on their own, but it's the moment when the lifeless body slides down the ramp into the bath that the humour really takes hold. The contest must go on. The winner must take the celebratory beer bath. There's no contingency plan in place if anything goes wrong.

Maddin has been toying with cultural rituals for as long as he's been making films. In his celebrated short The Dead Father (i986), the nuclear family life continues despite the presence of a corpse on the breakfast table. Archangel (1990) contains a scene in which a small boy is flogged and all parties involved, including the boy, agree it's for the best. Careful (1992) is a celebration of stern warnings not to deviate the slightest from village traditions. The ritual du jour in his latest film is the very act of being sad. Maddin, and his long-time collaborator George Toles, took an original script by British author Kazuo Ishiguro and transplanted it from 1980s London to Depression-era Winnipeg. According to the film, Winnipeg has the dubious distinction of having been named the world capital of sorrow by The Times. Perhaps there's an element of truth to this. "We call ourselves Winterpeg," Maddin points out. "No one else does. No one bothers to call us anything. We love our mosquitoes. There's something very sad about the way we adore Monty Hall and David Steinberg, who both claim to be from Toronto."

The sadness in the flint isn't quite distributed uniform]y. Winnipeg expatriate Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) moved to the United States to become a Broadway producer; but like his inspiration in Ace in the Hole (not to mention his namesake, the James Cagney character in Footlight Parade) he finds himself out of money and out of luck. Still, he's unable to feel real sadness, so for his part in the $25,000 contest he stages lavish spectacles. There's a running gag in the film about the way he hires Mexican, Jewish, Spanish and Indian musicians to be sad on America's behalf. His brother, Roderick (Ross McMillan), is at the other end of the spectrum. He represents Serbia, taking on the name Gavrilo the Great front Gavrilo Princip (the man who killed the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914), and with it he takes on that nation's sadness at having begun the chain of events that led to the First World War. His first performance is in front of a mural depicting the assassination of the archduke.