Mining the forgotten treasures of cinematic history, Guy Maddin is one of the most distinctive and alluring filmmaking talents at work today. His current project seems at first like an odd coupling – the director has adapted an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker Prize for “The Remains of the Day” – but in the hands of Maddin and long-time collaborator George Toles, The Saddest Music in the World is an emotional wonder. Filmed in tantalizing black and white in the style of a Golden Age musical melodrama – with Maddin’s singular, lavish direction – the film is a visually rapturous, appallingly funny tour de force.

It is 1933, the height of the Great Depression. To boost sales, beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) announces a global competition to determine the saddest music in the world. Musicians from every corner of the globe including Siam, Mexico and Scotland flock to wintry Winnipeg – the world capital of sorrow – to vie for the colossal twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize.

Against this droll backdrop, the members of the Kent family confront their secret past while locked in a rivalry to end all rivalries. Chester (Mark McKinney), the cynical, failed Broadway producer, prepares to entrance live crowds and radio listeners with some Yankee Doodle razzle-dazzle, while his older brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), a forlorn cellist who has returned from post-war Europe, will play out his anguish over the disappearance of his beloved wife. Complicating things further, Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), an amnesiac, nymphomaniac sleepwalker, has become Chester’s most recent companion and muse. Meanwhile the brothers’ father, the guilt-ridden Fyodor (David Fox), atones for the accidental amputation of the legs of his one true love by crafting glass legs filled with beer.

The ensemble cast revels in the wonderfully artificial world that the director has dreamed up. The Saddest Music in the World, resplendent with battles of passions, fears, all-consuming love and devastation, is driven by vintage Maddin rhythms and is a feast for the senses.