In Depression-era Winnipeg, a legless beer baroness, played by Isabella Rossellini in a performance that evokes Sternberg’s glamorously melancholy starlets, announces a contest inviting practitioners of the saddest music from around the world to the global capital of depression to compete for a prize of $25,000. In an expressionistic theater seemingly cobbled together with leftover flats from the production of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, international teams of musicians offer up their most dejected numbers to hordes of drunken audience members, competitions ultimately decided by the bellowing of a horn and Rossellini’s conclusive thumb. Parody of capitalist infiltration in Canada abounds, though lumps in the throat routinely follow laughs; The Saddest Music in the World mines nothing less than crippling depression and alcoholism for absurdist delirium. Maria De Medeiros (joining Maddin’s ever-growing collection of amnesiacs and lost objects of desire), Mark McKinney (doing a great burlesque of a Yankee theater producer) and Ross McMillan (playing a Serbian bearing insurmountable Great War guilt) round out the colorful ensemble.