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At the height of the Great Depression, literally legless beer magnate Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) aims to put her native Winnipeg on the map by hosting a Eurovision-style song contest whose international participants (Siamese flautists, Scottish bagpipers, Mexican mariachis) strive to outdo each other in musical lachrymosity. Estranged brothers Chester and Roderick Kent (Mark McKinney and Ross McMillan) compete while coming to terms with their own private grief, though Chester's brashly Americanised notion of "sadness, but with sass and pizzazz" suggests a man in terminal denial. Kazuo Ishiguro's screenplay was doubtless responsible for the unusually coherent narrative and emotional underpinning, but this is still a Guy Maddin film through and through, its scratchy images and soundtrack resembling a primitive early talkie, and its images of Rossellini sporting glass legs filled with bubbling beer could have come from no-one else. The new British DVD is far superior to its US counterpart, including a Maddin/McKinney commentary and a whole supporting feature, the utterly bonkers ice hockey / abortion / hand-lopping silent melodrama Cowards Bend The Knee.

 

Michael Brooke on 7th June 2005
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