THE RED VIOLIN  (1998)  **

Reviewed 7/4/99

Despite receiving heaps of acclaim in Canada before its release in the United States, The Red Violin is certainly less than the sum of its parts. Rarely do films constructed from multiple short stories work. Usually some of the stories are notably weaker than others, and the connection that brings them together in one film is implausibly contrived. This goes for The Red Violin, which traces the title instrument through five stories set in five different countries. None of the stories develop their characters very well leaving them all feeling one-note (no pun intended). The most intriguing is the tragedy of a child prodigy. The worst is a ridiculously overblown melodrama involving an English violinist and his love affair with a married woman.  The story of the Italian violin maker, his wife, and the violin's "secret" is equally hokey.

The Red Violin is supposed to be the perfect musical instrument, though in reality, it is the Stradivarius of Joshua Bell, who performs the music for all the onscreen actors (including Christoph Koncz, a real child prodigy). The music is composed by John Corigliano. Corigliano and Bell are both impressive, but the music is by far too luridly exhibitionistic. It is as if you took the hardest parts of Shostokovich's Violin Concerto and played it over and over again, faster each time. The compositions feel like style over substance.

The actors perform admirably, especially Jean-Luc Bideau as the teacher in the child prodigy story and Sylvia Chang in a story set during the Cultural Revolution in China. Alain Dostie's cinematography is striking and François Séguin's production design is solid, but director François Girard, who also did 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, has a cold, overly formal touch that  keeps us at too far a distance for this type of story. Glenn Gould suffered similarly, but the Bach Goldberg Variations provided a much greater unifying force than Corigliano's music does. The Red Violin is a step backward in pretentiousness for Girard.


Copyright © 1999 George Wu