Ripping up today's movie-making conventions, cult Canadian director Guy Maddin raids cinema's often forgotten past to conjure up deliriously eccentric offering The Saddest Music In The World. Shot entirely in a studio, it's the tale of a musical talent contest held in Winnipeg, the "world capital of sorrow", in the Great Depression of 1933. Double-amputee Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), the local beer magnate, has offered $25,000 to the competitor playing the saddest music in the world. Her former lover Chester (Mark McKinney), a struggling Broadway producer, returns home determined to win the prize.

Whilst charting the progress of this bizarre competition, whose winning contestants hurtle down a slide into a vat of beer, the ripely melodramatic movie plays out its various love triangles, Oedipal conflicts, and sibling rivalries. It turns out that Fyodor (David Fox), Chester's alcoholic and ultra-patriotic father, was also a paramour of Lady P, and was present at the accident in which she lost both her legs. Meanwhile Chester's elder cellist brother Roderick, Serbia's maestro of melancholy, is grieving for his dead son and disappeared wife: she happens to be the amnesiac Narcissa (Maria De Madeiros) who's currently Chester's squeeze.

"THE CAST HAVE A BALL"

Shot primarily in scratchy black and white, with occasionally garishly-coloured interludes, the film pays its own low-budget tribute to a range of earlier cinematic genres and styles. Freed from the constraints of naturalism, the cast have a ball, particularly McKinney's cheerfully scheming promoter. When he sees Lady P's beer-filled glass limbs that were manufactured by his own lovelorn dad, he quips, "Those are legs to die for. No varicose veins and no sag."

Beneath the formal pastiching and the deliberately excessive emotional outpourings, Maddin also finds time to send-up American cultural imperialism, with Chester's USA buying up the talent of other countries to appear in the Land of the Free's extravagant song-and-dance routines, and in the process turning other people's sorrow into schmaltzy entertainment.