The most accessible of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s films to date also boasts the most well known actor, Isabella Rossellini, looking more than ever the double of her illustrious mother. In his newest film, the director comes closer than in previous work to conventional movie making, but I use the term loosely - very loosely. Once again shot mostly in black and white, then washed with sepia or bold tones of blue or orange, there are also more full color sequences than in earlier films. How else to capture the pale golden hue of the lager that fills the artificial glass limbs of beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Rossellini)?

"The Saddest Music in the World" is a Maddin mix of 1920’s German expressionism, love triangle romance, and free association. It’s liberally peppered with healthy doses of social comment and America bashing (read the United States, pointedly not the whole of North and South America).

For those who know and like the bizarre quirkiness of Maddin, this has all the familiar elements but is more comprehensible and perhaps more watchable than some earlier work ("Cowards Bend the Knee," "Tales From The Gimli Hospital"). For those who have not seen his other work, "Saddest" is a good place to start.

The depression era story is set in frigid Winnipeg, Canada, and involves a contest for a big cash prize by Port-Huntley’s brewery to be awarded for the saddest music in the world. The handwriting is on the wall for the end of prohibition in the States and the Canadian brewery wants to get a jump-start on customer loyalty before the ban is lifted and opens the floodgate for profits by US firms. Down on their luck contestants from around the globe descend on the city in hopes of the great prize. The entries include everything from "California Here I Come" to a mournful rendition of "Skip To My Lou," as well as abundant music to slit one’s wrists by from around the planet.

The soap opera-worthy plot involves Broadway producer and Canadian expatriate Chester Kent, who has returned to his hometown of Winnipeg with his nymphomaniac girlfriend, Narcissa. Along with his melancholy brother, Roderick, and his anguished father, Fyodor, all are tied to Lady P and the tragic accident wherein she lost her legs. Shifty opportunist Chester moves in on the Baroness to rekindle their old romance and get an inside track to the prize.

Maddin’s unique style is unmatched for sheer inventiveness and visual novelty, re-tooling silent expressionist cinematic style and infusing it with humor and a lively mood that won’t quit. A straightforward original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro ("Remains of the Day") gets the Maddin treatment so that it’s hard to imagine it could be done any other way.

A slew of playful but barbed zingers, mostly from or about Americanized native son Chester, exhibits his razzle-dazzle, its-all-show-biz vulgar American approach; this is Maddin at his dark, hilarious best. Rosellini, in her Zigfield girl blond, tiara-crowned hairdo, and Mark McKinney as duplicitous, smarmy, but peculiarly likeable Chester are impeccable. It’s good, clean, eccentric, provocative fun.