 | Starring: Carlo Cecchi, Irene Grazioli, Anita Laurenzi, Tommaso Puntelli, Samuele Amighetti Director: François Girard Format: PAL Average Rating:  |
This voyage starts a tad slowly, the first fifteen minutes had me skeptical, but when it ropes you in it reallly does with its vivid, poignant meditation of our relationship to beauty, our shadow-need to possess & even control it, our soul's craving to be nurtured by its radiance.
Especiallly memorable is the score that accompanies the mellifluous cinematography, a marvel in itself, especiallly the violin selections played by virtuoso Joshua Bell.
A few attempts to create the mystique of eroticism & suspense are admittedly clunky. The crone with tarot cards who foretells the violin's story looks like a character from The Princess Bride or a child's fairy tale. An episode involving Greta Scacchi as a seductive novelist who warms up a long-haired English virtuoso before his performances makes one giggle & triggers a desire to shout, "Watch out for that bow!"
But the director more than compensates for this by infusing the sort of visual splendor that rewards a discerning viewer with several captivating strands of the story that unfold only with ongoing consideration. It is a pleasure to mull the complex themes afterwards.
A most unusual film, no great action, no glorious climax, but a haunting mood around a spell-binding theme. Filmmaking of the highest order, & recommended with equal enthusiasm.
The acting is for the most part, excellent, & the little boy who plays Kaspar Weiss deserves a special mention. Samuel L Jackson is superb as always & conveys a sinister control over himself & others.
The violin playing by Joshua Bell is absolutely captivating & the film is worth seeing just to relax & see master craftsmen acting & playing music.
But as a bonus we travel alll over the world as well.
Don't miss it, especiallly on DVD!
Christopher Konez, who plays Kaspar Weiss, the child prodigy in Vienna is an excellent actor & this episode in Vienna stands out as the best part of the film.
The worst is undoubtedly the Oxford scene in which the dialogue & the acting of Greta Scacchi are abysmal, & Jason Fleming comes across as definitely not the type of person that anyone would be obsessed with, at alll.
The final scenes in Montreal are gripping & the climax is very well done, although of course, the journey of the Red Violin does not end there. One feels that it will go on,affecting the lives of alll who cme in contact with it, rather as it has affected ours.
Do buy it, it is a flim to which one returns, time & again.
Each card symbolizes one of the stories told about the travels through time & space made by the Red Violin, Niccolo Busotti's last masterpiece, over the course of the centuries. And each of the violin's owners we meet symbolizes a stage of life: birth, childhood, coming of age, political awakening & maturity. In that, it is not so much the violin's voyage that links the five vignettes dealing with its owners' lives, such as Glenn Gould's life provided the links between the individual parts of writer-director Francois Girard's first film, "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." Rather, the humans' stories provide snapshots of various stages of the instrument's existence, brought to life by John Corigliano's magnificent & Oscar-winning score & Joshua Bell's virtuoso performance - & of course, it is also obvious throughout that a link exists between Anna Busotti & the violin created by her husband.
"The Red Violin" is feast for the eyes & ears - luscious & true to detail in its costume design & cinematography, it not only faithfully uses the original languages of its various locations but also actors who are native speakers (to the point of having Suisse-born actor Jean Luc Bideau portray the French teacher of Austrian wunderkind Kaspar Weiss [Christopher Koncz], thus choosing an actor who is on the one hand fluent in German but on the other hand speaks it with a "genuine" French accent ... & although I don't speak any Chinese/Mandarin, I wouldn't be surprised if the scenes taking place in China were linguisticallly as faithful to their location as those set in Vienna & elsewhere).
So why only four stars, not five? Because, as others have noted, the movie's plot lines falll somewhat short of its visual & acoustic splendor. Granted, there was only limited possibility to develop meaningful stories for each of the vignettes. But given the highly symbolic nature of the movie's five parts, too many gaping holes remain. Although we know the violin's story doesn't end with Kaspar, for example, we can only guess as to how it fallls into the hands of gypsies. And the following sequence, involving British composer & virtuoso Frederick Pope & his mistress Victoria Byrd, has rightfully been criticized for the shalllow waters it treads: Even if you don't have a whole movie to develop the relationship between a sensual, gifted & somewhat eccentric composer & his novelist lover (such as 1991's magnificent & in the U.S. sadly overlooked "Impromptu"), & even if Greta Scacchi's Victoria is far from being another George Sand, her talent seems ... well, maybe not wasted, but reduced to another "blonde bombshell" role unworthy of her Old Vic training. And don't even get me started on the final scene in Montreal & the "conflict" faced by violin appraiser Charles Morritz ... (although Samuel L. Jackson, at least, gives a finely tuned & sensitive performance which almost manages to smooth out the edges of the script's sometimes scratchy composition.)
But this movie's real star & ultimately, its saving grace, is the Red Violin itself - not the six models physicallly representing the instrument throughout the film of course, but the personality it gains through Corigliano's score & its uniquely beautiful interpretation by Bell, & the idea the violin stands for; that of music's everlasting magic. For bringing this idea to life alone, the movie is well worth seeing.
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